Professor Culin in his notes of "Palmistry in China and Japan," says: "The thumb, called in Japanese, oya-ubi, 'parent-finger,' is for parents. The little finger, called in Japanese, ko-ubi, 'child-finger,' is for children; the index-finger is for uncle, aunt, and elder brother and elder sister. The third finger is for younger brother and younger sister" (423a). A short little finger indicates childlessness, and lines on the palm of the hand, below the little finger, children. There are very many nursery-games and rhymes of various sorts based upon the hand and fingers, and in not a few of these the thumb and fingers play the role of mother and children. Froebel seized upon this thought to teach the child the idea of the family. His verses are well-known:—

"Das ist die Groszmama, Das ist der Groszpapa, Das ist der Vater, Das ist die Mutter, Das ist's kleine Kindchen ja; Seht die ganze Familie da. Das ist die Mutter lieb und gut, Das ist der Vater mit frohem Muth; Das ist der Bruder lang und grosz; Das ist die Schwester mit Puppchen im Schoosz; Und dies ist das Kindchen, noch klein und zart, Und dies die Familie von guter Art."

Referring to Froebel's games, Elizabeth Harrison remarks:—

"In order that this activity, generally first noticed in the use of the hands, might be trained into right and ennobling habits, rather than be allowed to degenerate into wrong and often degrading ones, Froebel arranged his charming set of finger-games for the mother to teach her babe while he is yet in her arms; thus establishing the right activity before the wrong one can assert itself. In such little songs as the following:—

'This is the mother, good and dear; This the father, with hearty cheer; This is the brother, stout and tall; This is the sister, who plays with her doll; And this is the baby, the pet of all. Behold the good family, great and small,'

the child is led to personify his fingers and to regard them as a small but united family over which he has control." (257 a. 14).

Miss Wiltse, who devotes a chapter of her little volume to "Finger-songs related to Family Life and the Imaginative Faculty," says:—

"The dawning consciousness of the child so turned to the family relations is surely better than the old nursery method of playing 'This little pig went to market'" (384. 45).

And from the father and mother the step to God is easy.

Dr. Brewer informs us that in the Greek and Roman Church the Trinity is symbolized by the thumb and first two fingers: "The thumb, being strong, represents the Father; the long, or second finger, Jesus Christ; and the first finger, the Holy Ghost, which proceedeth from the Father and the Son" (Dict. of Phrase and Fable, P. 299).

Mother-God.

The "Motherhood of God" is an expression that still sounds somewhat strangely to our ears. We have come to speak readily enough of the "Fatherhood of God" and the "Brotherhood of Man," but only a still small voice has whispered of the "Motherhood of God" and the "Sisterhood of Woman." Yet there have been in the world, as, indeed, there are now, multitudes to whom the idea of Heaven without a mother is as blank as that of the home without her who makes it. If over the human babe bends the human mother who is its divinity,—

"The infant lies in blessed ease Upon his mother's breast; No storm, no dark, the baby sees Invade his heaven of rest. He nothing knows of change or death— Her face his holy skies; The air he breathes, his mother's breath— His stars, his mother's eyes,"—

so over the infant-race must bend the All-Mother, das Ewigweibliche. Perhaps the greatest service that the Roman Catholic Church has rendered to mankind is the prominence given in its cult of the Virgin Mary to the mother-side of Deity. In the race's final concept of God, the embodiment of all that is pure and holy, there must surely be some overshadowing of a mother's tender love. With the "Father-Heart" of the Almighty must be linked the "Mother-Soul." To some extent, at least, we may expect a harking back to the standpoint of the Buddhist Kalmuck, whose child is taught to pray: "O God, who art my father and my mother."

In all ages and over the whole world peoples of culture less than ours have had their "mother-gods," all the embodiments of motherhood, the joy of the Magnificat, the sacrosanct expression of the poet's truth:—

"Close to the mysteries of God art thou, My brooding mother-heart,"

the recognition of that outlasting secret hope and love, of which the Gospel writer told in the simple words: "Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother," and faith in which was strong in the Mesopotamians of old, who prayed to the goddess Istar, "May thy heart be appeased as the heart of a mother who has borne children." The world is at its best when the last, holiest appeal is ad matrem. Professor O.T. Mason has eloquently stated the debt of the world's religions to motherhood (112. 12):—"The mother-goddess of all peoples, culminating in the apotheosis of the Virgin Mary, is an idea either originated by women, or devised to satisfy their spiritual cravings. So we may go through the pantheons of all peoples, finding counterparts of Rhea, mother-earth, goddess of fertility; Hera, queen of harvests, feeder of mankind; Hestia, goddess of the hearth and home, of families and states, giving life and warmth; Aphrodite, the beautiful, patron of romantic love and personal charms; Hera, sovereign lady, divine caciquess, embodiment of queenly dignity; Pallas Athene, ideal image of that central inspiring force that we learn at our mother's knee, and that shone in eternal splendour; Isis, the goddess of widowhood, sending forth her son Horus, to avenge the death of his father, Osiris; as moon-goddess, keeping alive the light until the sun rises again to bless the world."

The All-Mother.

In Polynesian mythology we find, dwelling in the lowest depths of Avaiki (the interior of the universe), the "Great Mother,"—the originator of all things, Vari-ma-te-takere, "the very beginning,"—and her pet child, Tu-metua, "Stick by the parent," her last offspring, inseparable from her. All of her children were born of pieces of flesh which she plucked off her own body; the first-born was the man-fish Vatea, "father of gods and men," whose one eye is the sun, the other the moon; the fifth child was Raka, to whom his mother gave the winds in a basket, and "the children of Raka are the numerous winds and storms which distress mankind. To each child is allotted a hole at the edge of the horizon, through which he blows at pleasure." In the songs the gods are termed "the children of Vatea," and the ocean is sometimes called "the sea of Vatea." Mr. Gill tells us that "the Great Mother approximates nearest to the dignity of creator"; and, curiously enough, the word Vari, "beginning," signifies, on the island of Rarotonga, "mud," showing that "these people imagined that once the world was a 'chaos of mud,' out of which some mighty unseen agent, whom they called Vari, evolved the present order of things" (458. 3, 21).

Another "All-Mother" is she of whom our own poets have sung, "Nature," the source and sustainer of all.

Mother-Nature.

"So ubt Natur die Mutterpflicht," sang the poet Schiller, and "Mother Nature" is the key-word of those modern poets who, in their mystic philosophy, consciously or unconsciously, revive the old mythologies. With primitive peoples the being, growing power of the universe was easily conceived as feminine and as motherly. Nature is the "great parent," the "gracious mother," of us all. In "Mother Nature," woman, the creator of the earliest arts of man, is recognized and personified, and in a wider sense even than the poet dreamt of: "One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin."

Pindar declared that "gods and men are sons of the same mother," and with many savage and barbaric tribes, gods, men, animals, and all other objects, animate and inanimate, are akin(388.210). As Professor Robertson Smith has said: "The same lack of any sharp distinction between the nature of different kinds of visible beings appears in the old myths in which all kinds of objects, animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, appear as cognate with one another, with men, and with the gods" (535.85). Mr. Hartland, speaking of this stage of thought, says: "Sun and moon, the wind and the waters, perform all the functions of living beings; they speak, they eat, they marry and have children" (258.26). The same idea is brought out by Count D'Alviella: "The highest point of development that polytheism could reach, is found in the conception of a monarchy or divine family, embracing all terrestrial beings, and even the whole universe" (388.211). Mr. Frank Cushing attributes like beliefs in the kinship of all existences to the Zuni Indians (388.66), and Mr. im Thurn to the Indians of Guiana (388.99).

This feeling of kinship to all that is, is beautifully expressed in the words of the dying Greek Klepht: "Do not say that I am dead, but say that I am married in the sorrowful, strange countries, that I have taken the flat stone for a mother-in-law, the black earth for my wife, and the little pebbles for brothers-in-law." (Lady Verney, Essays, II. 39.)

In the Trinity of Upper Egypt the second person was Mut, "Mother Nature." the others being Armin, the chief god, and their son, Khuns.

Among the Slavs, according to Mone, Ziwa is a nature-goddess, and the Wends regard her as "many-breasted Mother Nature," the producing and nourishing power of the earth. Her consort is Zibog, the god of life (125. II. 23).

Curiously reminiscent of the same train of ideas which has given to the moderson of Low German the signification of "bastard," is our own equivalent term "natural son."

Poets and orators have not failed to appeal to "Mother Nature" and to sing her panegyrics, but there is perhaps nothing more sweet and noble than the words of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: "Nature, like a loving mother, is ever trying to keep land and sea, mountain and valley, each in its place, to hush the angry winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat and cold, of rain and drought, that peace, harmony, and beauty may reign supreme," and the verses of Longfellow:—

"And Nature, the old nurse, took The child upon her knee, Saying, 'Here is a story-book Thy Father has—written for thee.

"'Come wander with me,' she said, 'Into regions yet untrod; And read what is still unread, In the manuscripts of God.'

"And he wandered away and away With Nature, the dear old nurse, Who sang to him, night and day, The rhymes of the universe.

"And whenever the way seemed long, Or his heart began to fail, She—would sing a more wonderful song, Or tell a more marvellous tale."

Through the long centuries Nature has been the mother, nurse, and teacher of man.

Other Mother-Goddesses.

Among other "mother-goddesses" of ancient Italy we find Maia Mater, Flora Mater, both deities of growth and reproduction; Lua Mater, "the loosing mother," a goddess of death; Acca Larentia, the mother of the Lares (Acca perhaps = Atta, a child-word for mother, as Lippert suggests); Mater matuta, "mother of the dawn," a goddess of child-birth, worshipped especially by married women, and to whom there was erected a temple at Care.

The mother-goddesses of Germany are quite numerous. Among those minor ones cited by Grimm and Simrock, are: Haulemutter, Mutter Holle, the Klagemutter or Klagemuhmen, Pudelmutter (a name applied to the goddess Berchta), Etelmutter, Kornmutter, Roggenmutter, Mutterkorn, and the interesting Buschgroszmutter, "bush grandmother," as the "Queen of the Wood-Folk" is called. Here the mother-feeling has been so strong as to grant to even the devil a mother and a grandmother, who figure in many proverbs and folk-locutions. When the question is asked a Mecklenburger, concerning a social gathering: "Who was there?" he may answer: "The devil and his mother (mom)"; when a whirlwind occurs, the saying is: "The Devil is dancing with his grandmother."

In China the position of woman is very low, and, as Mr. Douglas points out: "It is only when a woman becomes a mother that she receives the respect which is by right due to her, and then the inferiority of her sex disappears before the requirements of filial love, which is the crown and glory of China" (434. 125).

In Chinese cosmogony and mythology motherhood finds recognition. Besides the great Earth-Mother, we meet with Se-wang-moo, the "Western Royal Mother," a goddess of fairy-land, and the "Mother of Lightning," thunder being considered the "father and teacher of all living beings." Lieh-tze, a philosopher of the fifth century B.C., taught: "My body is not my own; I am merely an inhabitant of it for the time being, and shall resign it when I return to the 'Abyss Mother'" (434. 222, 225, 277).

In the Flowery Kingdom there is also a sect "who worship the goddess Pity, in the form of a woman holding a child in her arms."

Among the deities and semi-deities of the Andaman Islanders are chan.a.e.lewadi, the "mother of the race,"—Mother E.lewadi; chan.a.erep, chan.a.cha.ria, chan.a.te.liu, chan.a.li.mi, chan.a.jar.a.ngud, all inventors and discoverers of foods and the arts. In the religious system of the Andaman Islanders, Pu.luga-, the Supreme Being, by whom were created "the world and all objects, animate and inanimate, excepting only the powers of evil," and of whom it is said, "though his appearance is like fire, yet he is (nowadays) invisible," is "believed to live in a large stone house in the sky with a wife whom he created for himself; she is green in appearance, and has two names, chan.a.au.lola (Mother Freshwater Shrimp) and chan.a.pa.lak-—(Mother Eel); by her he has a large family, all except the eldest being girls; these last, known as mo.ro-win— (sky-spirits or angels), are said to be black in appearance, and, with their mother, amuse themselves from time to time by throwing fish and prawns into the streams and sea for the use of the inhabitants of the world" (498. 90). With these people also the first woman was chan.a.e.lewadi (Mother E-lewadi), the ancestress of the present race of natives. She was drowned, while canoeing, and "became a small crab of a description still named after her e.lewadi" (498. 96):

Quite frequently we find that primitive peoples have ascribed the origin of the arts or of the good things of life to women whom they have canonized as saints or apotheosized into deities.

We may close our consideration of motherhood and what it has given the world with the apt words of Zmigrodzki:—

"The history of the civilization (Kulturgeschichte) of our race, is, so to speak, the history of the mother-influence. Our ideas of morality, justice, order, all these are simply mother-ideas. The mother began our culture in that epoch in which, like the man, she was autodidactic. In the epoch of the Church Fathers, the highly educated mother saved our civilization and gave it a new turn, and only the highly educated mother will save us out of the moral corruption of our age. Taken individually also, we can mark the ennobling, elevating influence which educated mothers have exercised over our great men. Let us strive as much as possible to have highly accomplished mothers, wives, friends, and then the wounds which we receive in the struggle for life will not bleed as they do now" (174. 367).

The history of civilization is the story of the mother, a story that stales not with repetition. Richter, in his Levana, makes eloquent appeal:—

"Never, never has one forgotten his pure, right-educating mother! On the blue mountains of our dim childhood, towards which we ever turn and look, stand the mothers who marked out for us from thence our life; the most blessed age must be forgotten ere we can forget the warmest heart. You wish, O woman, to be ardently loved, and forever, even till death. Be, then, the mothers of your children."

Tennyson in The Foresters uses these beautiful words: "Every man for the sake of the great blessed Mother in heaven, and for the love of his own little mother on earth, should handle all womankind gently, and hold them in all honour." Herein lies the whole philosophy of life. The ancient Germans were right, who, as Tacitus tells us, saw in woman sanctum aliquid et providum, as indeed the Modern German Weib (cognate with our wife) also declares, the original signification of the word being "the animated, the inspirited."



CHAPTER IV.

THE CHILD'S TRIBUTE TO THE FATHER.

If the paternal cottage still shuts us in, its roof still screens us; and with a father, we have as yet a prophet, priest, and king, and an obedience that makes us free.—Carlyle.

To you your father should be as a god.—Shakespeare.

Our Father, who art in Heaven.—Jesus.

Father of all! in every age, In every clime adored, By saint, by savage, and by sage, Jehovah, Jove, or Lord.—Pope.

Names of the Father.

Father, like mother, is a very old word, and goes back, with the cognate terms in Italic, Hellenic, Teutonic, Celtic, Slavonic, and Indo-Aryan speech, to the primitive Indo-European language, and, like mother, it is of uncertain etymology.

An English preacher of the twelfth century sought to derive the word from the Anglo-Saxon fedan, "to feed," making the "father" to be the "feeder" or "nourisher," and some more modern attempts at explanation are hardly better. This etymology, however incorrect, as it certainly is, in English, does find analogies in the tongues of primitive peoples. In the language of the Klamath Indians, of Oregon, the word for "father" is t'shishap (in the Modoc dialect, p'tishap), meaning "feeder, nourisher," from a radical tshi, which signifies "to give somebody liquid food (as milk, water)." Whether there is any real connection between our word pap,—with its cognates in other languages,—which signifies "food for infants," as well as "teat, breast," and the child-word papa, "father," is doubtful, and the same may be said of the attempt to find a relation between teat, tit, etc., and the widespread child-words for "father," tat, dad. Wedgewood (Introd. to Dictionary), however, maintained that: "Words formed of the simplest articulations, ma and pa, are used to designate the objects in which the infant takes the earliest interest,—the mother, the father, the mother's breast, the act of taking or sucking food." Tylor also points out how, in the language of children of to-day, we may find a key to the origin of a mass of words for "father, mother, grandmother, aunt, child, breast, toy, doll," etc. From the limited supply of material at the disposal of the early speakers of a language, we can readily understand how the same sound had to serve for the connotation of different ideas; this is why "mama means in one tongue mother, in another father, in a third, uncle; dada in one language father, in a second nurse, in another breast; tata in one language father, in another son," etc. The primitive Indo-European p-tr, Skeat takes to be formed, with the agent-suffix tr, from the radical pa, "to protect, to guard,"—the father having been originally looked upon as the "protector," or "guarder." Max Muller, who offers the same derivation, remarks: "The father, as begetter, was called in Sanskrit ganitar, as protector and supporter of his posterity, however, pitar. For this reason, in the Veda both names together are used in order to give the complete idea of 'father.' In like manner, matar, 'mother,' is joined with ganit, 'genetrix,' and this shows that the word matar must have soon lost its etymological signification and come to be a term, of respect and caress. With the oldest Indo-Europeans, matar meant 'maker,' from ma, 'to form.'"

Kluge, however, seems to reject the interpretation "protector, defender," and to see in the word a derivative from the "nature-sound" pa. So also Westermarck (166. 86-94). In Gothic, presumably the oldest of the Teutonic dialects, the most common word for "father" is atta, still seen in the name of the far-famed leader of the Huns, Attila, i.e. "little father," and in the atti of modern Swiss dialects. To the same root attach themselves Sanskrit atta, "mother, elder sister"; Ossetic adda, "little father (Vaterchen)"; Greek arra, Latin atta, "father"; Old Slavonic oti-ci, "little father"; Old Irish aite, "foster-father." Atta belongs to the category of "nature-words" or "nursery-words" of which our dad (daddy) is also a member.

Another member is the widespread papa, pa. Our word papa, Skeat thinks, is borrowed, through the French, from Latin papa, found as a Roman cognomen. This goes back in all probability to ancient Greek, for, in the Odyssey (vi. 57), Nausicaa addresses her father as [Greek: pappa phile], "dear papa." The Papa of German is also borrowed from French, and, according to Kluge, did not secure a firm, place in the language until comparatively late in the eighteenth century.

In some of the Semitic languages the word for "father" signifies "maker," and the same thing occurs elsewhere among primitive people (166. 91).

As with "mother," so with "father"; in many languages a man (or a boy) does not employ the same term as a woman (or a girl). In the Haida, Okanak'en, and Kootenay, all Indian languages of British Columbia, the words used by males and by females are, respectively: kun, qat; lEe'u, mistm; tito, so.

In many languages the word for "father," as is also the case with "mother," is different when the parent is addressed from that used when he is spoken of or referred to. In the Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Nootka, Ntlakyapamuq, four Indian languages of British Columbia, the words for "father" when addressed, are respectively a'bo, ats, no'we, pap, and for "father" in other cases, nEgua'at, au'mp, nuwe'k'so, ska'tsa. Here, again, it will be noticed that the words used in address seem shorter and more primitive in character.

In the Chinantee language of Mexico, nuh signifies at the same time "father" and "man." In Gothic aba means both "father" and "husband" (492. 33). Here belongs also perhaps the familiar "father" with which the New England housewife was wont to address her husband.

With many peoples the name "father" is applied to others than the male parent of the child. The following remarks of McLennan, regarding the Tamil and Telugu of India, will stand for not a few other primitive tribes: "All the brothers of a father are usually called fathers, but, in strictness, those who are older than the father are called great fathers, and those who are younger, little fathers. With the Puharies, all the brothers of a father are equally fathers to his children." In Hawaii, the term "male parent" "applied equally to the father, to the uncles, and even to distant relations." In Japan, the paternal uncle is called "little father" and the maternal uncle "second little father" (100. 389, 391).

A lengthy discussion of these terms, with a wealth of illustration from many primitive languages, will be found in Westermarck (166. 86-94).

Father-Right.

Of the Roman family it has been said: "It was a community comprising men and things. The members were maintained by adoption as well as by consanguinity. The father was before all things the chief, the general administrator. He was called father even when he had no son; paternity was a question of law, not one of persons. The heir is no more than the continuing line of the deceased person; he was heir in spite of himself for the honour of the defunct, for the lares, the hearth, the manes, and the hereditary sepulchre" (100. 423). In ancient Rome the paterfamilias and the patina potestas are seen in their extreme types. Letourneau remarks further: "Absolute master, both of things and of people, the paterfamilias had the right to kill his wife and to sell his sons. Priest and king in turn, it was he who represented the family in their domestic worship; and when, after his death, he was laid by the side of his ancestors in the common tomb, he was deified, and helped to swell the number of the household gods" (100. 433).

Post thus defines the system of "father-right":—

"In the system of 'father-right' the child is related only to the father and to the persons connected with him through the male line, but not with his mother and the persons connected with him through the female line. The narrowest group organized according to father-right consists of the father and his children. The mother, for the most part, appears in the condition of a slave to the husband. To the patriarchal family in the wider sense belong the children of the sons of the father, but not the children of his daughters; the brothers and sisters of the same father, but not those merely related to the same mother; the children of the brother of the same father, but not the children of the sisters of the same father, etc. With every wife the relationship ceases every time" (127. I. 24).

The system of father-right is found scattered over the whole globe. It is found among the Indo-European peoples (Aryans of Asia, Germans, Slavs, Celts, Romans), the Mongol-Tartar tribes, Chinese, Japanese, and some of the Semitic nations; in northern Africa and scattered through the western part of the continent, among the Kaffirs and Hottentots; among some tribes in Australia and Polynesia and the two Americas (the culture races).

The position of the father among those peoples with whom strict mother-right prevails is thus sketched by Zmigrodski (174.206):—

"The only certain thing was motherhood and the maternal side of the family,—mother, daughter, granddaughter, that was the fixed stem continuing with certainty. Father, son, grandson, were only the leaves, which existed only until the autumnal wind of death tore them away, to hurl them into the abyss of oblivion. In that epoch no one said, 'I am the son of such a father and the grandson of such a grandfather,' but 'I am the son of such a mother and the grandson of such a grandmother.' The inheritance went not to the son and grandson, but to the daughter and to the granddaughter, and the sons received a dowry as do the daughters in our society of to-day. In marriage the woman did not assume the name of the man, but vice versa. The husband of a woman, although the father of her children, was considered not so near a relative of them as the wife's brother, their uncle."

Dr. Brinton says, concerning mother-right among the Indians of North America (412. 48):—

"Her children looked upon her as their parent, but esteemed their father as no relation whatever. An unusually kind and intelligent Kolosch Indian was chided by a missionary for allowing his father to suffer for food. 'Let him go to his own people,' replied the Kolosch, 'they should look after him.' He did not regard a man as in any way related or bound to his paternal parent."

In a certain Polynesian mythological tale, the hero is a young man, "the name of whose father had never been told by his mother," and this has many modern parallels (115. 97). On the Gold Coast of West Africa there is a proverb, "Wise is the son that knows his own father" (127.1. 24), a saying found elsewhere in the world,—indeed, we have it also in English, and Shakespeare presents but another view of it when he tells us: "It is a wise father that knows his own child."

In many myths and folk-and fairy-tales of all peoples the discovery by the child of its parent forms the climax, or at least one of the chief features of the plot; and we have also those stories which tell how parents have been killed unwittingly by their own children, or children have been slain unawares by their parents.

Father-King.

In his interesting study of "Royalty and Divinity" (75), Dr. von Held has pointed out many resemblances between the primitive concepts "King" and "God." Both, it would seem, stand in close connection with "Father." To quote from Dr. von Held: "Fathership (Vaterschaft, patriarcha), lordship (Herrentum), and kingship (Konigtum) are, therefore (like rex and [Greek: Basileus]), ideas not only linguistically, but, to even a greater degree really, cognate, having altogether very close relationship to the word and idea 'God.' Of necessity they involve the existence and idea of a people, and therefore are related not only to the world of faith, but also to that of intellect and of material things."

The Emperor of China is the "father and mother of the empire," his millions of subjects being his "children"; and the ancient Romans had no nobler title for their emperor than pater patrice, the "father of his country," an appellation bestowed in these later days upon the immortal first President of the United States.

In the Yajnavalkya, one of the old Sanskrit law-books, the king is bidden to be "towards servants and subjects as a father" (75. 122), and even Mirabeau and Gregoire, in the first months of the States-General, termed the king "le pere de tous les Franqais," while Louis XII. and Henry IV. of France, as well as Christian III. of Denmark, had given to them the title "father of the people." The name pater patrice was not borne by the Caesars alone, for the Roman Senate conferred the title upon Cicero, and offered it to Marius, who refused to accept it. "Father of his Country" was the appellation of Cosmo de' Medici, and the Genoese inscribed the same title upon the base of the statue erected to Andrea Doria. One of the later Byzantine Emperors, Andronicus Palaologus, even went so far as to assume this honoured title. Nor has the name "Father of the People" been confined to kings, for it has been given also to Gabriel du Pineau, a French lawyer of the seventeenth century.

The "divinity that doth hedge a king" and the fatherhood of the sovereign reach their acme in Peru, where the Inca was king, father, even god, and the halo of "divine right" has not ceased even yet to encircle the brows of the absolute monarchs of Europe and the East.

Landesvater (Vater des Volkes) is the proudest designation of the German Kaiser. "Little Father" is alike the literal meaning of Attila, the name of the far-famed leader of the "Huns," in the dark ages of Europe, and of batyushka, the affectionate term by which the peasant of Russia speaks of the Czar.

Nana, "Grandfather," is the title of the king of Ashanti in Africa, and "Sire" was long in France and England a respectful form of address to the monarch.

Some of the aboriginal tribes of America have conferred upon the President of the United States the name of the "Great Father at Washington," the "Great White Father," and "Father" was a term they were wont to apply to governors, generals, and other great men of the whites with whom they came into contact.

The father as head of the family is the basis of the idea of "father-king." This is seen among the Matchlapis, a Kaffir tribe, where "those who own a sufficient number of cattle to maintain a family have the right to the title of chief"; this resembles the institution of the pater familias in ancient Latium (100. 459,533).

Dr. von Held thus expresses himself upon this point: "The first, and one may say also the last, naturally necessary society of man is the family in the manifold forms out of which it has been historically developed. Its beginning and its apex are, under given culture-conditions, the man who founds it, the father. What first brought man experientially to creation as a work of love was fatherhood. This view is not altered by the fact that the father, in order to preserve, or, what is the same, to continue to produce, to bring up, must command, force, punish. If the family depends on no higher right, it yet appears as the first state, and then the father appears not only as father, but also as king" (75. 119).

The occurrence to-day of "King" as a surname takes us back to a time when the head of the family enjoyed the proud title, which the Romans conferred upon Casar Augustus, Pater et Princeps, the natural development from Ovid's virque paterque gregis.

The Romans called their senators patres, and we now speak of the "city fathers," aldermen, eldermen, in older English, and the "fathers" of many a primitive people are its rulers and legislators. The term "father" we apply also to those who were monarchs and chiefs in realms of human activity other than that of politics. Following in the footsteps of the Latins, who spoke of Zeno as Pater stoicorum, of Herodotus as Pater historioe, and even of the host of an inn as Pater cenoe, we speak of "fathering" an idea, a plot, and the like, and denominate "father," the pioneer scientists, inventors, sages, poets, chroniclers of the race.

From pater the Romans derived patrimonium, patrimony, "what was inherited from the father," an interesting contrast to matrimonium; patronus, "patron, defender, master of slaves"; patria (terra), "fatherland,"—Ovid uses paterna terra, and Horace speaks of paternum flumen; patricius, "of fatherly dignity, high-born, patrician," etc. Word after word in the classic tongues speaks of the exalted position of the father, and many of these have come into our own language through the influence of the peoples of the Mediterranean.

Father-Priest.

Said Henry Ward Beecher: "Look at home, father-priest, mother-priest; your church is a hundred-fold heavier responsibility than mine can be. Your priesthood is from God's own hands." The priesthood of the father is widespread. Mr. Gomme tells us: "Certainly among the Hindus, the Greeks, the Romans, and, so late down as Tacitus, the Germans, the house-father was priest and judge in his own clan" (461.104). Max Muller speaks to the same effect: "If we trace religion back to the family, the father or head of the family is ipso facto the priest. When families grew into clans, and clans into tribes and confederacies, a necessity would arise of delegating to some heads of families the performance of duties which, from having been the spontaneous acts of individuals, had become the traditional acts of families and clans" (510.183). Africa, Asia, America, furnish us abundant evidence of this. Our own language testifies to it also. We speak of the "Fathers of the Church,"—patres, as they were called,—and the term "Father" is applied to an ecclesiastic of the Roman Catholic Church, just as in the Romance languages of Europe the descendants of the Latin pater (French pere, Spanish padre, Italian padre, etc.) are used to denote the same personage. In Russian an endearing term for "priest" is batyushka, "father dear"; the word for a village-priest, sometimes used disrespectfully, is pop. This latter name is identical with the title of the head of the great Catholic Church, the "Holy Father," at Rome, viz. papa, signifying literally "papa, father," given in the early days of Latin Christianity, and the source of our word Pope and its cognates in the various tongues of modern Europe. The head of an abbey we call an abbot, a name coming, through the Church-Latin abbas, from the Syriac abba, "father"; here again recurs the correlation of priest and father. It is interesting to note that both the words papa and abba, which we have just discussed, and which are of such importance in the history of religion, are child-words for "father," bearing evidence of the lasting influence of the child in this sphere of human activity. Among the ancient Romans we find a pater patratus, whose duty it was to ratify treaties with the proper religious rites. Dr. von Held is of opinion that, "in the case of a special priesthood, it is not so much the character of its members as spiritual fathers, as their calling of servants of God, of servants of a Father-God, which causes them to be termed fathers, papas" (75. 120).

Father-God.

Shakespeare has aptly said, in the words which Theseus addresses to the fair Hermia:—

"To you your father should be as a god; One that composed your beauties, yea, and one To whom you are but as a form in wax, By him imprinted, and within his power To leave the figure or disfigure it,"

and widespread indeed, in the childhood of the race, has been the belief in the Fatherhood of God. Concerning the first parents of human kind the ancient Hebrew Scripture declares: "And God created man in His own image," and long centuries afterwards, in his memorable oration to the wise men of Athens upon Mars' Hill, the Apostle Paul quoted with approval the words of the Greek poet, Cleanthes, who had said: "For we are all His off-spring." Epictetus, appealing to a master on behalf of his slaves, asked: "Wilt thou not remember over whom thou rulest, that they are thy relations, thy brethren by nature, the offspring of Zeus?" (388.210).

At the battle of Kadshu, Rameses II., of Egypt, abandoned by his soldiers, as a last appeal, exclaimed: "I will call upon thee, O my father Amon!" (388. 209).

Many prophets and preachers have there been who taught to men the doctrine of "God, the Father," but last and best of all was the "Son of Man," the Christ, who taught his disciples the world-heard prayer: "Our Father, who art in Heaven," who pro-claimed that "in my Father's house are many mansions," and whose words in the agony of Gethsemane were: "Abba, Father, all things are possible unto Thee; remove this cup from me: howbeit not what I will, but what Thou wilt."

Between the Buddhist Kalmucks, with whom the newly married couple reverently utter these words: "I incline myself this first time to my Lord God, who is my father and my mother" (518. I. 423), and the deistic philosophers of to-day there is a vast gulf, as there is also between the idea of Deity among the Cakchiquel Indians of Guatemala, where the words for God alom and achalom signify respectively "begetter of children," and "begetter of sons," and the modern Christian concept of God, the Father, with His only begotten Son, the Saviour of the world.

The society of the gods of human creation has everywhere been modelled upon that of man. He was right who said Olympus was a Greek city and Zeus a Greek father. According to D'Alviella: "The highest point of development that polytheism could reach is found in the conception of a monarchy or divine family, embracing all terrestrial beings, and even the whole universe. The divine monarch or father, however, might still be no more than the first among his peers. For the supreme god to become the Only God, he must rise above all beings, superhuman as well as human, not only in his power, but in his very nature" (388. 211).

Though the mythology of our Teutonic forefathers knew of the "All-Father,"—the holy Odin,—it is from those children-loving people, the Hebrews, that our Christian conception of "God the Father," with some modifications, is derived. As Professor Robertson Smith has pointed out, among the Semites we find the idea of the tribal god as father strongly developed: "But in heathen religions the fatherhood of the gods is a physical fatherhood. Among the Greeks, for example, the idea that the gods fashioned men out of clay, as potters fashion images, is relatively modern. The older conception is that the races of men have gods for their ancestors, or are the children of the earth, the common mother of gods and men, so that men are really of the same stock or kin of the gods. That the same conception was familiar to the older Semites appears from the Bible. Jeremiah describes idolaters as saying to a stock, Thou art my father; and to a stone, Thou hast brought me forth. In the ancient poem, Num. xxi. 29, the Moabites are called the sons and daughters of Chemosh, and, at a much more recent date, the prophet Malachi calls a heathen woman, 'the daughter of a strange god'" (535. 41-43).

Professor Smith cites also the evidence furnished by genealogies and personal names: "The father of Solomon's ally, Hiram, King of Tyre, was called Abibaal, 'my father is Baal'; Ben-Hadad, of Damascus, is 'the son of the god Hadad'; in Aramaan we find names like Barlaha, 'son of God,' Barba'shmin, 'son of the Lord of Heaven,' Barate, 'son of Ate,' etc." We have also that passage in Genesis which tells how the "sons of God saw the daughters of men that were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose" (vi. 2), while an echo of the same thought dwells with the Polynesians, who term illegitimate children tamarika na te Atua, "children of the gods" (458. 121). D'Alviella further remarks: "Presently these family relations of the gods were extended till they embraced the whole creation, and especially mankind. The confusion between the terms for creating and begetting, which still maintained itself in half-developed languages, must have led to a spontaneous fusion of the ideas of creator and father." But there is another aspect of this question. Of the Amazulu Callaway writes: "Speaking generally, the head of each house is worshipped by the children of that house; for they do not know the ancients who are dead, nor their laud-giving names, nor their names. But their father whom they knew is the head by whom they begin and end in their prayer, for they know him best, and his love for his children; they remember his kindness to them whilst he was living; they compare his treatment of them whilst he was living, support themselves by it, and say, 'He will treat us in the same way now he is dead. We do not know why he should regard others beside us; he will regard us only.'" Of these people it is true, as they themselves say: "Our father is a great treasure to us, even when he is dead" (417.144).

Here we pass over to ancestor worship, seen at its height in China, whose great sage, Confucius, taught: "The great object of marriage is to beget children, and especially sons, who may perform the required sacrifices at the tombs of their parents" (434. 126).

In this connection, the following passage from Max Muller is of interest: "How religious ideas could spring from the perception of something infinite or immortal in our parents, grandparents, and ancestors, we can see even at the present day. Among the Zulus, for instance, Unkulunkulu or Ukulukulu, which means the great-great-grandfather, has become the name of God. It is true that each family has its own Unkulunkulu, and that his name varies accordingly. But there is also an Unkulunkulu of all men (unkulunladu wabantu bonke), and he comes very near to being a father of all men. Here also we can watch a very natural process of reasoning. A son would look upon his father as his progenitor; he would remember his father's father, possibly his father's grandfather. But beyond that his own experience could hardly go, and therefore the father of his own great-grandfather, of whom he might have heard, but whom he had never seen, would naturally assume the character of a distant unknown being; and, if the human mind ascended still further, it would almost by necessity be driven to a father of all fathers, that is to a creator of mankind, if not of the world" (510. 156).

Again we reach the "Father" of Pope's "Universal Prayer"—

"Father of all! in every age, In every clime adored, By saint, by savage, and by sage, Jehovah, Jove, or Lord,"

having started from the same thought as the Hebrews in the infancy of their race. An Eastern legend of the child Abraham has crystallized the idea. It is said that one morning, while with his mother in the cave in which they were hiding from Nimrod, he asked his mother, "Who is my God?" and she replied, "It is I." "And who is thy God?" he inquired farther. "Thy father" (547.69). Hence also we derive the declaration of Du Vair, "Nous devons tenir nos peres comme des dieux en terre," and the statement of another French writer, of whom Westermarck says: "Bodin wrote, in the later part of the sixteenth century, that, though the monarch commands his subjects, the master his disciples, the captain his soldiers, there is none to whom nature has given any command except the father, 'who is the true image of the great sovereign God, universal father of all things'" (166. 238).

Father-Sky.

"Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky,"

sang the poet Herbert, unconsciously renewing an ancient myth. As many cosmologies tell, Day and Dawn were born of the embraces of Earth and Sky. Ushas, Eos, Aurora, is the daughter of heaven, and one story of the birth is contained in the Maori myth of Papa and Rangi. Ushas, Max Muller tells us, "has two parents, heaven and earth, whose lap she fills with light" (510. 431). From Rangi, "Father-Sky," and Papa, "Mother-Earth," say the Maoris of New Zealand, sprang all living things; and, in like manner, the Chinese consider the Sky or Heaven,—Yang, the masculine, procreative, active element,—to be the "father of all things," while the Earth,—Yu, the feminine, conceiving, passive element,—is the "mother of all things." From the union of these two everything in existence has arisen, and consequently resembles the one or the other (529. 107).

Among the primitive Aryans, the Sky, or Heaven God, was called "Father," as shown by the Sanskrit Dyaus Pitar, Greek Zeus Patar, Latin Jupiter, all of which names signify "sky father." Dyaus is also called janitar, "producer, father," and Zeus, the "eternal father of men," the "father of gods and men, the ruler and preserver of the world." In the Vedic hymns are invocations of Dyaus (Sky), as "our Father," and of Prithivi (Earth), as "our Mother" (388. 210).

Dyaus symbolizes the "bright sky"; from the same primitive Indo-European root come the Latin words dies (day), deus or divus (god); the dark sombre vault of heaven is Varuna, the Greek [Greek: Ouranos], Latin Uranus.

Other instances of the bridal of earth and sky,—of "mother earth," and "father sky,"—are found among the tribes of the Baltic, the Lapps, the Finns (who have Ukko, "Father Heaven," Akka, "Mother Earth"), and other more barbaric peoples.

In Ashanti, the new deity, which the introduction of Christianity has added to the native pantheon, is called Nana Nyankupon, "Grandfather-sky" (438. 24).

The shaman of the Buryats of Alarsk prays to "Father Heaven"; in the Altai Mountains the prayer is to

"Father Yulgen, thrice exalted, Whom the edge of the moon's axe shuns, Who uses the hoof of the horse. Thou, Yulgen, hast created all men, Who are stirring round about us, Thou, Yulgen, hast endowed us with all cattle; Let us not fall into sorrow! Grant that we may resist the evil one!" (504. 70, 77).

We too have recollections of that "Father-Sky," whom our far-off ancestors adored, the bright, glad, cheerful sky, the "ancestor of all." Max Muller has summed up the facts of our inheritance in brief terms:—

"Remember that this Dyaush Pitar is the same as the Greek [Greek: Zeus Patar], and the Latin Jupiter, and you will see how this one word shows us the easy, the natural, the almost inevitable transition from the conception of the active sky as a purely physical fact, to the Father-Sky with all his mythological accidents, and lastly to that Father in heaven whom Aschylus meant when he burst out in his majestic prayer to Zeus, whosoever he is" (510. 410).

Unnumbered centuries have passed, but the "witchery of the soft blue sky" has still firm hold upon the race, and we are, as of old, children of "our Father, who art in Heaven."

Father-Sea.

Montesinos tells us that Viracocha, "sea-foam," the Peruvian god of the sea, was regarded as the source of all life and the origin of all things,—world-tiller, world-animator, he was called (509. 316). Xenophanes of Kolophon, a Greek philosopher of the sixth century B.C., taught that "the mighty sea is the father of clouds and winds and rivers." In Greek mythology Oceanus is said to be the father of the principal rivers of earth. Neptune, the god of the sea,—"Father Neptune," he is sometimes called,—had his analogue in a deity whom the Libyans looked upon as "the first and greatest of the gods." To Neptune, as the "Father of Streams," the Romans erected a temple in the Campus Martius and held games and feasts in his honour. The sea was also spoken of as pater aequoreus.

Father-River.

The name "Father of Waters" is assigned, incorrectly perhaps, to certain American Indian languages, as an appellation of the Mississippi. From Macaulay's "Lay of Horatius," we all know

"O Tiber, Father Tiber, To whom the Romans pray,"

and "Father Thames" is a favourite epithet of the great English river.

Father-Frost.

In our English nursery-lore the frost is personified as a mischievous boy, "Jack Frost," to whose pranks its vagaries are due. In old Norse mythology we read of the terrible "Frost Giants," offspring of Ymir, born of the ice of Niflheim, which the warmth exhaled from the sun-lit land of Muspelheim caused to drop off into the great Ginnunga-gap, the void that once was where earth is now. In his "Frost Spirit" Whittier has preserved something of the ancient grimness.

We speak commonly of the "Frost-King," whose fetters bind the earth in winter.

In Russia the frost is called "Father Frost," and is personified as a white old man, or "a mighty smith who forges strong chains with which to bind the earth and the waters," and on Christmas Eve "the oldest man in each family takes a spoonful of kissel (a sort of pudding), and then, having put his head through the window, cries: 'Frost, Frost, come and eat kissel! Frost, Frost, do not kill our oats! Drive our flax and hemp deep into the ground'" (520.223-230).

Quite different is the idea contained in Grimm's tale of "Old Mother Frost,"—the old woman, the shaking of whose bed in the making causes the feathers to fly, and "then it snows on earth."

Father Fire.

Fire has received worship and apotheosis in many parts of the globe. The Muskogee Indians of the southeastern United States "gave to fire the highest Indian title of honour, grandfather, and their priests were called 'fire-makers'" (529. 68). The ancient Aztecs called the god of fire "the oldest of the gods, Huehueteotl, and also 'our Father,' Tota, as it was believed that from him all things were derived." He was supposed "to govern the generative proclivities and the sexual relations," and he was sometimes called Xiuhtecutli, "'God of the Green Leaf,' that is, of vegetable fecundity and productiveness." He was worshipped as "the life-giver, the active generator of animate existence,"—the "primal element and the immediate source of life" (413). These old Americans were in accord with the philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus, who held that "fire is the element, and all things were produced in exchange for fire"; and Heraclitus, in the fragments in which he speaks of "God," the "one wise," that which "knows all things," means "Fire." In the rites of the Nagualists occurs a "baptism by fire," which was "celebrated on the fourth day after the birth of the child, during which time it was deemed essential to keep the fire burning in the house, but not to permit any of it to be carried out, as that would bring bad luck to the child," and, in the work of one of the Spanish priests, a protest is made: "Nor must the lying-in women and their assistants be permitted to speak of Fire as the father and mother of all things, and the author of nature; because it is a common saying with them that Fire is present at the birth and death of every creature." It appears also that the Indians who followed this strange cult were wont to speak of "what the Fire said and how the Fire wept" (413. 45-46).

Among various other peoples, fire is regarded as auspicious to children; its sacred character is widely recognized. In the Zend-Avesta, the Bible of the ancient Persians, whose religion survives in the cult of the Parsees, now chiefly resident in Bombay and its environs, we read of Ahura-Mazda, the "Wise Lord," the "Father of the pure world," the "best thing of all, the source of light for the world." Purest and most sacred of all created things was fire, light (421. 32). In the Sar Dar, one of the Parsee sacred books, the people are bidden to "keep a continual fire in the house during a woman's pregnancy, and, after the child is born, to burn a lamp [or, better, a fire] for three nights and days, so that the demons and fiends may not be able to do any damage and harm." It is said that when Zoroaster, the founder of the ancient religion of Persia, was born, "a demon came at the head of a hundred and fifty other demons, every night for three nights, to slay him, but they were put to flight by seeing the fire, and were consequently unable to hurt him" (258. 96).

In ancient Rome, among the Lithuanians on the shores of the Baltic, in Ireland, in England, Denmark, Germany, "while a child remained unbaptized," it was, or is, necessary "to burn a light in the chamber." And in the island of Lewis, off the northwestern coast of Scotland, "fire used to be carried round women before they were churched, and children before they were christened, both night and morning; and this was held effectual to preserve both mother and infant from evil spirits, and (in the case of the infant) from being changed."

In the Gypsy mountain villages of Upper Hungary, during the baptism of a child, the women kindle in the hut a little fire, over which the mother with the baptized infant must step, in order that milk may not fail her while the child is being suckled (392. II. 21).

In the East Indies, the mother with her new-born child is made to pass between two fires.

Somewhat similar customs are known to have existed in northern and western Europe; in Ireland and Scotland especially, where children were made to pass through or leap over the fire.

To Moloch ("King"), their god of fire, the Phoenicians used to sacrifice the first-born of their noblest families. A later development of this cult seems to have consisted in making the child pass between two fires, or over or through a fire. This "baptism of fire" or "purification by fire," was in practice among the ancient Aztecs of Mexico. To the second water-baptism was added the fire-baptism, in which the child was drawn through the fire four times (509. 653).

Among the Tarahumari Indians of the Mexican Sierra Madre, the medicine-man "cures" the infant, "so that it may become strong and healthy, and live a long life." The ceremony is thus described by Lumholtz: "A big fire of corn-cobs, or of the branches of the mountain-cedar, is made near the cross [outside the house], and the baby is carried over the smoke three times towards each cardinal-point, and also three times backward. The motion is first toward the east, then toward the west, then south, then north. The smoke of the corn-cobs assures him of success in agriculture. With a fire-brand the medicine-man makes three crosses on the child's forehead, if it is a boy, and four, if a girl" (107. 298).

Among certain South American tribes the child and the mother are "smoked" with tobacco (326. II. 194).

With marriage, too, fire is associated. In Yucatan, at the betrothal, the priest held the little fingers of bridegroom and bride to the fire (509. 504), and in Germany, the maiden, on Christmas night, looks into the hearth-fire to discover there the features of her future husband (392. IV. 82). Rademacher (130a) has called attention to the great importance of the hearth and the fireplace in family life. In the Black Forest the stove is invoked in these terms: "Dear oven, I beseech thee, if thou hast a wife, I would have a man" (130 a. 60). Among the White Russians, before the wedding, the house of the bridegroom and that of the bride are "cleansed from evil spirits," by burning a heap of straw in the middle of the living-room, and at the beginning of the ceremonies, after they have been elevated upon a cask, as "Prince" and "Princess," the guests, with the wedding cake and two tapers in their hands, go round the cask three times, and with the tapers held crosswise burn them a little on the neck, the forehead, and the temples, so that the hair is singed away somewhat. At church the wax tapers are of importance: if they burn brightly and clearly, the young couple will have a happy, merry married life; if feeble, their life will be a quiet one; if they flicker, there will be strife and quarrels between them (392 (1891). 161).

Writing of Manabozho, or Michabo, the great divinity of the Algonkian tribes of the Great Lakes, Dr. D. G. Brinton says: "Michabo, giver of life and light, creator and preserver, is no apotheosis of a prudent chieftain, still less the fabrication of an idle fancy, or a designing priestcraft, but, in origin, deeds, and name, the not unworthy personification of the purest conceptions they possessed concerning the Father of All" (409. 469).

To Agni, fire, light, "in whom are all the gods," the ancient Hindu prayed: "Be unto us easy of access, as a father to his son" (388. 210), and later generations of men have seen in light the embodiment of God. As Max Muller says, "We ourselves also, though we may no longer use the name of Morning-Light for the Infinite, the Beyond, the Divine, still find no better expression than Light when we speak of the manifestations of God, whether in nature or in our mind" (510. 434).

In the Christian churches of to-day hymns of praise are sung to God as "Father of Light and Life," and their neophytes are bidden, as of old, to "walk as Children of Light."

Father-Sun.

At the naming of the new-born infant in ancient Mexico, the mother thus addressed the Sun and the Earth: "Thou Sun, Father of all that live, and thou Earth, our Mother, take ye this child, and guard it as your son." A common affirmation with them was: "By the life of the Sun, and of our Lady, the Earth" (529. 97).

Many primitive tribes have the custom of holding the newborn child up to the sun.

Not a few races and peoples have called themselves "children of the sun." The first of the Incas of Peru—a male and a female—were children of the Sun "our Father," who, "seeing the pitiable condition of mankind, was moved to compassion, and sent to them, from Heaven, two of his children, a son and a daughter, to teach them how to do him honour, and pay him divine worship "; they were also instructed by the sun in all the needful arts of life, which they taught to men (529. 102). When the "children of the Sun" died, they were said to be "called to the home of the Sun, their Father" (100. 479).

The Comanche Indians, who worship the sun with dances and other rites, call him taab-apa, "Father Sun," and the Sarcees speak of the sun as "Our Father," and of the earth as "Our Mother" (412. 122, 72).

With the Piute Indians "the sun is the father and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief. The moon is his wife, and the stars are their children. The sun eats his children whenever he can catch them. They fall before him, and are all the time afraid when he is passing through the heavens. When he (their father) appears in the morning, you see all the stars, his children, fly out of sight,—go away back into the blue of the above,—and they do not wake to be seen again until he, their father, is about going to his bed" (485. I. 130).

Dr. Eastman says of the Sioux Indians: "The sun was regarded as the father, and the earth as the mother, of all things that live and grow; but, as they had been married a long time and had become the parents of many generations, they were called the great-grandparents" (518 (1894). 89).

Widespread over the earth has been, and still is, the worship of the sun; some mythologists, indeed, would go too far and explain almost every feature of savage and barbarous religion as a sun-myth or as smacking of heliolatry.

Imagery and figurative language borrowed from the consideration of the aspect and functions of the great orb of day have found their way into and beautified the religious thought of every modern Christian community. The words of the poet Thomson:

"Prime cheerer light! Of all material beings first and best! Efflux divine! Nature's resplendent robe! Without whose vesting beauty all were wrapt In unessential gloom; and thou, O Sun! Soul of surrounding worlds! in whom best seen Shines out thy Maker!"

find briefer expression in the simple speech of the dying Turner: "The sun is God."

Father-Earth.

Though, in nearly every portion of the globe the apotheosis of earth is as a woman, we find in America some evidences of a cult of the terrestrial Father-God. Concerning the cave-worship of the Mexican aborigines, Dr. Brinton says (413. 38, 50): "The intimate meaning of this cave-cult was the worship of the Earth. The Cave-God, the Heart of the Hills, really typified the Earth, the Soil, from whose dark recesses flow the limpid streams and spring the tender shoots of the food-plants as well as the great trees. To the native Mexican the Earth was the provider of food and drink, the common Father of All; so that, to this day, when he would take a solemn oath, he stoops to the earth, touches it with his hand, and repeats the solemn formula: 'Cuix amo nechitla in toteotzin? Does not our Great God see me?'"

Father-Wind.

Dr. Berendt, when travelling through the forests of Yucatan, heard his Maya Indian guide exclaim in awe-struck tones, as the roar of a tornado made itself heard in the distance: He catal nohoch yikal nohoch tat, "Here comes the mighty wind of the Great Father." As Dr. Brinton points out, this belief has analogues all over the world, in the notion of the wind-bird, the master of breath, and the spirit, who is father of all the race, for we learn also that "the whistling of the wind is called, or attributed to, tat acmo, words which mean 'Father Strong-Bird'" (411. 175).

The cartography of the Middle Ages and the epochs of the great maritime discoveries has made us familiar with the wind-children, offspring of the wind-father, from whose mouths came the breezes and the storms, and old Boreas, of whom the sailors sing, has traces of the fatherhood about him. More than one people has believed that God, the Father, is Spirit, breath, wind.

Other Father-Gods.

The ancient Romans applied the term Pater to many of their gods beside the great Jove. Vulcan was called Lemnus Pater, the "Lemnian Father"; Bacchus, Pater Lenaus; Janus, the "early god of business," is termed by Horace, Matutinus Pater, "Early-morning Father"; Mars is Mars Pater, etc. The Guarayo Indians, of South America, prayed for rain and bountiful harvests to "Tamoi, the grandfather, the old god in heaven, who was their first ancestor and had taught them agriculture" (100. 288).

The Abipones, of Paraguay, called the Pleiades their "Grandfather" and "Creator." When the constellation was invisible, they said: "Our Grandfather, Keebet, is ill" (509. 274, 284).

In his account of the folk-lore of Yucatan, Dr. Brinton tells us that the giant-beings known as Hbalamob, or balams, are sometimes "affectionately referred to as yum balam, or 'Father Balam.'" The term yum is practically the equivalent of the Latin pater, and of the "father," employed by many primitive peoples in addressing, or speaking of, their great male divinities (411. 176).

In his acute exposition of the philosophy of the Zuni Indians, Mr. Gushing tells us (424. 11) that "all beings, whether deistic and supernatural, or animistic and mortal, are regarded as belonging to one system; and that they are likewise believed to be related by blood seems to be indicated by the fact that human beings are spoken of as the 'children of men,' while all other beings are referred to as 'the Fathers,' the 'All-Fathers (A-ta-tchu),' and 'Our Fathers.'" The "Priest'of the Bow," when travelling alone through a dangerous country, offers up a prayer, which begins: "Si! This day, My Fathers, ye Animal Beings, although this country be filled with enemies, render me precious" (424. 41). The hunter, in the ceremonial of the "Deer Medicine," prays: "Si! This day, My Father, thou Game Animal, even though thy trail one day and one night hast (been made) round about; however, grant unto me one step of my earth-mother. Wanting thy life-blood, wanting that flesh, hence I address to thee good fortune, address to thee treasure," etc. When he has stricken down the animal, "before the 'breath of life' has left the fallen deer (if it be such), he places its fore feet back of its horns, and, grasping its mouth, holds it firmly, closely, while he applies his lips to its nostrils and breathes as much wind into them as possible, again inhaling from the lungs of the dying animal into his own. Then, letting go, he exclaims: 'Ah! Thanks, my father, my child. Grant unto me the seeds of earth ('daily bread') and the gift of water. Grant unto me the light of thy favour, do" (424. 36).

Something of a like nature, perhaps, attaches to the bear-ceremonials among the Ainu and other primitive peoples of northeastern Asia, with whom that animal is held in great respect and reverence, approaching to deification.

Of Po-shai-an-k'ia, "the God (Father) of the Medicine Societies, or sacred esoteric orders of the Zunis," Mr. Gushing tells us: "He is supposed to have appeared in human form, poorly clad, and therefore reviled by men; to have taught the ancestors of the Zuni, Taos, Oraibi, and Coconino Indians their agricultural and other arts; their systems of worship by means of plumed and painted prayer-sticks; to have organized their medicine societies, and then to have disappeared toward his home in Shi-pa-pu-li-ma (from shi-pa-a = mist, vapour; u-lin, surrounding; and i-mo-na = sitting-place of; 'The mist-enveloped city'), and to have vanished beneath the world, whence he is said to have departed for the home of the Sun. He is still the conscious auditor of the prayers of his children, the invisible ruler of the spiritual Shi-pa-pu-li-ma, and of the lesser gods of the medicine orders, the principal 'Finisher of the Paths of our Lives.' He is, so far as any identity can be established, the 'Montezuma' of popular and usually erroneous Mexican tradition" (424. 16). Both on the lowest steps of civilization and on the highest, we meet with this passing over of the Father into the Son, this participation of God in the affairs and struggles of men.



CHAPTER V.

THE NAME CHILD.

Liebe Kinder haben viele Namen [Dear children have many names].—German Proverb.

Child or boy, my darling, which you will.—Swinburne.

Men ever had, and ever will have, leave To coin new words well-suited to the age. Words are like leaves, some wither every year, And every year a younger race succeeds.—Roscommon.

Child and its Synonyms.

Our word child—the good old English term; for both babe and infant are borrowed—simply means the "product of the womb" (compare Gothic kilthei, "womb"). The Lowland-Scotch dialect still preserves an old word for "child" in bairn, cognate with Anglo-Saxon bearn, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish, and Gothic barn (the Gothic had a diminutive barnilo, "baby"), Sanskrit bharna, which signifies "the borne one," "that which is born," from the primitive Indo-European root bhr, "to bear, to carry in the womb," whence our "to bear" and the German "ge-baren." Son, which finds its cognates in all the principal Aryan dialects, except Latin, and perhaps Celtic,—the Greek [Greek: yios] is for [Greek: syios], and is the same word,—a widespread term for "male child, or descendant," originally meant, as the Old Irish suth, "birth, fruit," and the Sanskrit su, "to bear, to give birth to," indicate, "the fruit of the womb, the begotten"—an expression which meets us time and again in the pages of the Hebrew Bible. The words offspring, issue, seed, used in higher diction, explain themselves and find analogues all over the world. To a like category belong Sanskrit garbha, "brood of birds, child, shoot"; Pali gabbha, "womb, embryo, child"; Old High German chilburra, "female lamb"; Gothic kalbo, "female lamb one year old"; German Kalb; English calf; Greek [Greek: delphus], "womb"; whence [Greek: adelphus], "brother," literally "born of the same womb." Here we see, in the words for their young, the idea of the kinship of men and animals in which the primitive races believed. The "brought forth" or "born" is also the signification of the Niskwalli Indian ba'-ba-ad, "infant"; de-bad-da, "infant, son"; Maya al, "son or daughter of a woman"; Cakchiquel 4ahol, "son," and like terms in many other tongues. Both the words in our language employed to denote the child before birth are borrowed. Embryo, with its cognates in the modern tongues of Europe, comes from the Greek [Greek: embruon], "the fruit of the womb before delivery; birth; the embryo, foetus; a lamb newly born, a kid." The word is derived from eu, "within"; and bruo, "I am full of anything, I swell or teem with"; in a transitive sense, "I break forth." The radical idea is clearly "swelling," and cognates are found in Greek [Greek: bruon], "moss"; and German Kraut, "plant, vegetable." Foetus comes to us from Latin, where it meant "a bearing, offspring, fruit; bearing, dropping, hatching,—of animals, plants, etc.; fruit, produce, offspring, progeny, brood." The immediate derivation of the word is feto, "I breed," whence also effetus, "having brought forth young, worn out by bearing, effete." Feto itself is from an old verb feuere, "to generate, to produce," possibly related to fui and our be. The radical signification of foetus then is "that which is bred, or brought to be"; and from the same root fe are derived feles, "cat" (the fruitful animal); fe-num, "hay"; fe-cundus, "fertile"; fe-lix, "happy" (fruitful). The corresponding verb in Greek is [Greek: phuein], "to grow, to spring forth, to come into being," whence the following: [Greek: phusis], "a creature, birth, nature,"—nature is "all that has had birth"; [Greek: phuton] "something grown, plant, tree, creature, child"; [Greek: phulae, philon] "race, clan, tribe,"—the "aggregate of those born in a certain way or place"; [Greek: phus], "son"; [Greek: phusas], "father," etc.

In English, we formerly had the phrase "to look babies in the eyes," and we still speak of the pupil of the eye, the old folk-belief having been able to assert itself in the every-day speech of the race,—the thought that the soul looked out of the windows of the eyes. In Latin, pupilla pupila, "girl, pupil of the eye," is a diminutive of pupa (puppa), "girl, damsel, doll, puppet"; other related words are pupulus, "little boy"; pupillus, "orphan, ward," our pupil; pupulus, "little child, boy"; pupus, "child, boy." The radical of all these is pu, "to beget"; whence are derived also the following: puer, "child, boy"; puella (for puerula), a diminutive of puer, "girl"; pusus, "boy"; pusio, "little boy," pusillus; "a very little boy"; putus, "boy"; putillus, "little boy"; putilla, "little girl,"—here belongs also pusillanimus, "small-minded, boy-minded"; pubis, "ripe, adult"; pubertas, "puberty, maturity"; pullus, "a young animal, a fowl," whence our pullet. In Greek we find the cognate words [Greek: polos] "a young animal," related to our foal, filly; [Greek: polion], "pony," and, as some, perhaps too venturesome, have suggested, [Greek: pais], "child," with its numerous derivatives in the scientifical nomenclature and phraseology of to-day. In Sanskrit we have putra, "son," a word familiar as a suffix in river-names,—Brahmaputra, "son of Brahma,"—pota, "the young of an animal," etc. Skeat thinks that our word boy, borrowed from Low German and probably related to the Modern High German Bube, whence the familiar "bub" of American colloquial speech, is cognate with Latin pupus.

To this stock of words our babe, with its diminutive baby, seems not akin. Skeat, rejecting the theory that it is a reduplicative child-word, like papa, sees in it merely a modification (infantine, perhaps) of the Celtic maban, diminutive of mab, "son," and hence related to maid, the particular etymology of which is discussed elsewhere.

Infant, also, is a loan-word in English. In Latin, infans was the coinage of some primitive student of children, of some prehistoric anthropologist, who had a clear conception of "infancy" as "the period of inability to speak,"—for infans signifies neither more nor less than "not speaking, unable to speak." The word, like our "childish," assumed also the meanings "child, young, fresh, new, silly," with a diminutive infantulus. The Latin word infans has its representatives in French and other Romance languages, and has given rise to enfanter, "to give birth to a child," enfantement, "labour," two of the few words relating to child-birth in which the child is directly remembered. The history of the words infantry, "foot-soldiers," and Infanta, "a princess of the blood royal" in Spain (even though she be married), illustrates a curious development of thought.

Our word daughter, which finds cognates in Teutonic, Slavonic, Armenian, Zend, Sanskrit, and Greek, Skeat would derive from the root dugh, "to milk," the "daughter" being primitively the "milker," —the "milkmaid,"—which would remove the term from the list of names for "child" in the proper sense of the word. Kluge, however, with justice perhaps, considers this etymology improbable.

A familiar phrase in English is "babes and sucklings," the last term of which, cognate with German Saugling, meets with analogues far and wide among the peoples of the earth. The Latin words for children in relation to their parents are filius (diminutive filiolus), "son," and filia (diminutive filiola), "daughter," which have a long list of descendants in the modern Neo-Latin or Romance languages,—French fils, fille, filleul, etc.; Italian figlio, figlia, etc. According to Skeat, filius signified originally "infant," perhaps "suckling," from felare, "to suck," the radical of which, fe (Indo-European dhe), appears also in femina, "woman," and femella, "female," the "sucklers" par excellence. In Greek the cognate words are [Greek: titthae], "nurse," thaelus, "female," thaelae, "teat," etc.; in Lithuanian, dels, "son." With nonagan, "teat, breast," are cognate in the Delaware Indian language nonoshellaan, "to suckle," nonetschik, "suckling," and other primitive tongues have similar series.

The Modern High German word for child is Kind, which, as a substantive, finds representatives neither in Gothic nor in early English, but has cognates in the Old Norse kunde, "son," Gothic -kunds, Anglo-Saxon -kund, a suffix signifying "coming from, originating from." The ultimate radical of the word is the Indo-European root gen (Teutonic ken), "to bear, to produce," whence have proceeded also kin, Gothic kuni; queen, Gothic qvens, "woman"; king, Modern High German Konig, originally signifying perhaps "one of high origin"; Greek genos and its derivatives; Latin genus, gens, gigno; Lithuanian gentis, "relative"; Sanskrit janas, "kin, stock," janus, "creature, kin, birth," jantu, "child, being, stock," jata, "son." Kind, therefore, while not the same word as our child, has the same primitive meaning, "the produced one," and finds further cognates in kid and colt, names applied to the young of certain animals, and the first of which, in the slang of to-day, is applied to children also. In some parts of Germany and Switzerland Kind has the sense of boy; in Thuringia, for example, people speak of zwei Kinder und ein Madchen, "two boys and a girl." From the same radical sprang the Modern High German Knabe, Old High German chnabo, "boy, youth, young fellow, servant," and its cognates, including our English knave, with its changed meaning, and possibly also German Knecht and English knight, of somewhat similar import originally.

To the same original source we trace back Greek [Greek: genetaer], Latin genitor, "parent," and their cognates, in all of which the idea of genesis is prominent. Here belong, in Greek: [Greek: genesis], "origin, birth, beginning"; [Greek: gynae], "woman"; [Greek: genea], "family, race"; [Greek: geinomai], "I beget, produce, bring forth, am born"; [Greek: gignomai], "I come into a new state of being, become, am born." In Latin: gigno, "I beget, bring forth"; gens, "clan, race, nation,"—those born in a certain way; ingens, "vast, huge, great,"—"not gens," i.e. "born beyond or out of its kind"; gentilis, "belonging to the same clan, race, tribe, nation," then, with various turns of meaning, "national, foreign," whence our gentile, genteel, gentle, gentry, etc.; genus, "birth, race, sort, kind"; ingenium, "innate quality, natural disposition"; ingeniosus, "of good natural abilities, born well-endowed," hence ingenious; ingenuus, "native, free-born, worthy of a free man," hence "frank, ingenuous"; progenies, "descent, descendants, offspring, progeny"; gener, "son-in-law"; genius, "innate superior nature, tutelary deity, the god born to a place," hence the genius, who is "born," not "made"; genuinus, "innate, born-in, genuine"; indigena, "native, born-there, indigenous"; generosus, "of high, noble birth," hence "noble-minded, generous"; genero, "I beget, produce, engender, create, procreate," and its derivatives degenero, regenero, etc., with the many words springing from them. From the same radical gen comes the Latin (g)nascor, "I am born," whose stem (g)na is seen also in natio, "the collection of those born," or "the birth," and natura, "the world of birth,"—like Greek [Greek: phnsis],—for "nations" and "nature" have both "sprung into being." The Latin germen (our germ), which signified "sprig, offshoot, young bud, sprout, fruit, embryo," probably meant originally simply "growth," from the root ker, "to make to grow." From the same Indo-European radical have come the Latin creare, "to create, make, produce," with its derivatives procreare and creator, which we now apply to the Supreme Being, as the "maker" or "producer" of all things. Akin are also crescere, "to come forth, to arise, to appear, to increase, to grow, to spring, to be born," and Ceres, the name of the goddess of agriculture (growth and creation), whence our word cereal; and in Greek [Greek: Kronos], the son of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaa (Earth), [Greek: kratos], "strength," and its derivatives ("democracy," etc.).

Another interesting Latin word is pario, "I bring forth, produce," whence parens, "producer, parent," partus, "birth, bearing, bringing forth; young, offspring, foetus, embryo of any creature," parturio, parturitio, etc. Pario is used alike of human beings, animals, birds, fish, while parturio is applied to women and animals, and, by Virgil, even to trees,—parturit arbos, "the tree is budding forth,"—and by other writers to objects even less animate.

In the Latin enitor, "I bring forth or bear children or young,"—properly, "I struggle, strive, make efforts,"—we meet with the idea of "labour," now so commonly associated with child-bearing, and deriving from the old comparison of the tillage of the soil and the bearing of the young. This association existed in Hebrew also, and Cain, the first-born of Adam, was the first agriculturist. We still say the tree bears fruit, the land bears crops, is fertile, and the most characteristic word in English belonging to the category in question is "to bear" children, cognate with Modern High German ge-baren, Gothic gabairan, Latin ferre (whence fertilis), Greek [Greek: ferein], Sanskrit bhri, etc., all from the Indo-European root bher, "to carry"—compare the use of tragen in Modern High German: sie tragt ein Kind unter dem Herzen. The passive verb is "to be born" literally, "to be borne, to be carried, produced," and the noun corresponding, birth, cognate with German Geburt, and Old Norse burthr, which meant "embryo" as well. Related ideas are seen in burden, and in the Latin, fors, fortuna, for "fortune" is but that which is "borne" or "produced, brought forth," just as the Modern High German Heil, "fortune, luck," is probably connected with the Indo-European radical gen, "to produce."

Corresponding to the Latin parentes, in meaning, we have the Gothic berusjos, "the bearers," or "parents"; we still use in English, "forbears," in the sense of ancestors. The good old English phrase "with child," which finds its analogues in many other languages, has, through false modesty, been almost driven out of literature, as it has been out of conversational language, by pregnant, which comes to us from the Latins, who also used gravidus,—a word we now apply only to animals, especially dogs and ants,—and enceinte, borrowed from French, and referring to the ancient custom of girding a woman who was with child. Similarly barren of direct reference to the child are accouchement, which we have borrowed from French, and the German Entbindung.

In German, Grimm enumerates, among other phrases relating to child-birth, the following, the particular meanings and uses of which are explained in his great dictionary: Schwanger, gross zum Kinde, zum Kinde gehen, zum Kinde arbeiten, um's Kind kommen, mit Kinde, ein Kind tragen, Kindesgrosz, Kindes schwer, Kinder haben, Kinder bekommen, Kinder kriegen, niederkommen, entbinden, and the quaint and beautiful eines Kindes genesen,—all used of the mother. Applied to both parents we find Kinder machen, Kinder bekommen (now used more of the mother), Kinder erzeugen (more recently, of the father only), Kinder erzielen.

Our English word girl is really a diminutive (from a stem gir, seen in Old Low German gor, "a child") from some Low German dialect, and, though it now signifies only "a female child, a young woman," in Middle English gerl (girl, gurl) was applied to a young person of either sex. In the Swiss dialects to-day gurre, or gurrli, is a name given to a "girl" in a depreciatory sense, like our own "girl-boy." In many primitive tongues there do not appear to be special words for "son" and "daughter," or for "boy" and "girl," as distinguished from each other, these terms being rendered "male-child (man-child)," and "female-child (woman-child)" respectively. The "man-child" of the King James' version of the Scriptures belongs in this category. In not a few languages, the words for "son" and "daughter" and for "boy" and "girl" mean really "little man," and "little woman"—a survival of which thought meets us in the "little man" with which his elders are even now wont to denominate "the small boy." In the Nahuatl language of Mexico, "woman" is ciuatl, "girl" ciuatontli; in the Niskwalli, of the State of Washington, "man" is stobsh, "boy" stotomish, "woman" slane, "girl" chachas (i.e. "small") slane; in the Tacana, of South. America, "man" is dreja, "boy" drejave, "woman" epuna, "girl" epunave. And but too often the "boys" and "girls" even as mere children are "little men and women" in more respects than that of name.

In some languages the words for "son," "boy," "girl" are from the same root. Thus, in the Mazatec language, of Mexico, we find indidi "boy," tzadi "girl," indi "son," and in the Cholona, of Peru, nun-pullup "boy," ila-pullup "girl," pul "son,"—where ila means "female," and nun "male."

In some others, as was the case with the Latin puella, from puer, the word for "girl" seems derived from that for "boy." Thus, we have in Maya, mehen "son," ix-mehen "daughter,"— -ix is a feminine prefix; and in the Jivaro, of Ecuador, vila "son," vilalu, "daughter."

Among very many primitive peoples, the words for "babe, infant, child," signify really "small," "little one," like the Latin parvus, the Scotch wean (for wee ane, "wee one"), etc. In Hawaiian, for example, the "child" is called keiki, "the little one," and in certain Indian languages of the Western Pacific slope, the Wiyot kusha'ma "child," Yuke unsil "infant," Wintun cru-tut "infant," Niskwalli cha chesh "child (boy)," all signify literally "small," "little one."

Some languages, again, have diminutives of the word for "child," often formed by reduplication, like the wee wean of Lowland Scotch, and the pilpil, "infant" of the Nahuatl of Mexico.

In the Snanaimuq language, of Vancouver Island, the words k.a'ela, "male infant," and k.a'k.ela, "female infant," mean simply "the weak one." In the Modoc, of Oregon, a "baby" is literally, "what is carried on one's self." In the Tsimshian, of British Columbia, the word wok.a'uts, "female infant," signifies really "without labrets," indicating that the creature is yet too young for the lip ornaments. In Latin, liberi, one of the words for "children," shows on its face that it meant only "children, as opposed to the slaves of the house, servi"; for liberi really denotes "the free ones." In "the Galibi language of Brazil, tigami signifies 'young brother, son, and little child,' indiscriminately." The following passage from Westermarck recalls the "my son," etc., of our higher conversational or even officious style (166.93):—

"Mr. George Bridgman states that, among the Mackay blacks of Queensland, the word for 'daughter' is used by a man for any young woman belonging to the class to which his daughter would belong if he had one. And, speaking of the Australians, Eyre says, 'In their intercourse with each other, natives of different tribes are exceedingly punctilious and polite; ... almost everything that is said is prefaced by the appellation of father, son, brother, mother, sister, or some other similar term, corresponding to that degree of relationship which would have been most in accordance with their relative ages and circumstances."

Similar phenomena meet us in the language of the criminal classes, and the slang of the wilder youth of the country.

Among the Andaman Islanders: "Parents, when addressing or referring to their children, and not using names, employ distinct terms, the father calling his son dar o-dire, i.e. 'he that has been begotten by me,' and his daughter, dar o-dire-pail-; while the mother makes use of the word dab e-tire, i.e. 'he whom I have borne,' for the former, and dab e-tire pail- for the latter; similarly, friends, in speaking of children to their parents, say respectively, ngar o-dire, or ngab e-tire (your son), ngar o-dire-pail-, or ngab e-tire-pail- (your daughter)" (498. 59).

In the Tonkawe Indian language of Texas, "to be born" is nikaman yekewa, literally, "to become bones," and in the Klamath, of Oregon, "to give birth," is nkacgi, from nkak, "the top of the head," and gi, "to make," or perhaps from kak'gi, "to produce bones," from the idea that the seat of life is in the bones. In the Nipissing dialect of the Algonkian tongue, ni kanis, "my brother," signifies literally, "my little bone," an etymology which, in the light of the expressions cited above, reminds one of the Greek [Greek: adelphos], and the familiar "bone of my bone," etc. A very interesting word for "child" is Sanskrit toka, Greek [Greek: teknon], from the Indo-European radical tek, "to prepare, make, produce, generate." To the same root belong Latin texere, "to weave," Greek [Greek: technae] "art"; so that the child and art have their names from the same primitive source—the mother was the former of the child as she was of the chief arts of life.

"Flower-Names."

The people who seem to have gone farthest in the way of words for "child" are the Andaman Islanders, who have an elaborate system of nomenclature from the first year to the twelfth or fifteenth, when childhood may be said to end. There are also in use a profusion of "flower-names" and complimentary terms. The "flower-names" are confined to girls and young women who are not mothers. The following list shows the peculiarity of the name-giving:—

1. Proper name chosen before birth of child: .do'ra.

2. If child turns out to be a boy, he is called: .do'ra-o'ta; if a girl, .do'ra-ka'ta; these names (o'ta and ka'ta refer to the genital organs of the two sexes) are used during the first two or three years only.

3. Until he reaches puberty, the boy is called: .do'ra da'la, and the girl, .do'ra-po'il'ola.

4. When she reaches maturity, the girl is said to be un-la-wi, or a'ka-la-wi, and receives a "flower-name" chosen from the one of "the eighteen prescribed trees which blossom in succession" happening to be in season when she attains womanhood.

5. If this should occur in the middle of August, when the Pterocarpus dalbergoides, called cha'langa, is in flower, ".do'ra-po-ilola would become .cha'garu do'ra, and this double name would cling to the girl until she married and was a mother, then the 'flower' name would give way to the more dignified term chan'a (madam or mother).do'ra; if childless, a woman has to pass a few years of married life before she is called chan'a, after which no further change is made in her name."

Much other interesting information about name-giving may be found in the pages of Mr. Man's excellent treatise on this primitive people (498. 59-61; 201-208).

Sign Language.

Interesting details about signs and symbols for "child" may be found in the elaborate article of Colonel Mallery on "Sign Language among North American Indians" (497a), and the book of Mr. W. P. Clark on Indian Sign Language (420).

Colonel Mallery tells us that "the Egyptian hieroglyphists, notably in the designation of Horus, their dawn-god, used the finger in or on the lips for 'child.' It has been conjectured in the last instance that the gesture implied, not the mode of taking nourishment, but inability to speak, in-fans." This conjecture, however, the author rejects (497a. 304). Among the Arapaho Indians "the sign for child, baby, is the forefinger in the mouth, i.e. a nursing child, and a natural sign of a deaf-mute is the same;" related seem also the ancient Chinese forms for "son" and "birth," as well as the symbol for the latter among the Dakota Indians (494 a. 356). Clark describes the symbol for "child," which is based upon those for "parturition" and "height," thus: "Bring the right hand, back outwards, in front of centre of body, and close to it, fingers extended, touching, pointing outwards and downwards; move the hands on a curve downwards and outwards; then carry the right hand, back outwards, well out to front and right of body, fingers extended and pointing upwards, hand resting at supposed height of child; the hand is swept into last position at the completion of first gesture. In speaking of children generally, and, in fact, unless it is desired to indicate height or age of the child, the first sign is all that is used or is necessary. This sign also means the young of any animal. In speaking of children generally, sometimes the signs for different heights are only made. Deaf-mutes make the combined sign for male and female, and then denote the height with right hand held horizontally" (420. 109).

For "baby," deaf-mutes "hold extended left hand back down, in front of body, forearm about horizontal and pointing to right and front; then lay the back of partially compressed right hand on left forearm near wrist" (420. 57).

Names.

The interesting and extensive field of personal onomatology—the study of personal names—cannot be entered upon exhaustively here. Shakespeare has said:—

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet,"—

and the same remark might be made of the children of some primitive peoples. Not infrequently the child is named before it is born. Of the Central Eskimo we read that often before the birth of the child, "some relative or friend lays his hand upon the mother's stomach, and decides what the infant is to be called; and, as the name serves for either sex, it is of no consequence whether it be a girl or a boy" (402. 612, 590). Polle has a good deal to say of the deep significance of the name with certain peoples—"to be" and "to be named" appearing sometimes as synonymous (517. 99). "Hallowed be Thy name" expresses the ideas of many generations of men. With the giving of a name the soul and being of a former bearer of it were supposed to enter into and possess the child or youth upon whom it was conferred. Kink says of the Eskimo of East Greenland, that "they seemed to consider man as consisting of three independent parts,—soul, body, name" (517. 122). One can easily understand the mysterious associations of the name, the taboos of its utterance or pronunciation so common among primitive peoples—the reluctance to speak the name of a dead person, as well as the desire to confer the name of such a one upon a new-born child, spring both from the same source.

The folk-lore and ceremonial of name-giving are discussed at length in Ploss, and the special treatises on popular customs. In several parts of Germany, it is held to be ominous for misfortune or harm to the child, if the name chosen for it should be made known before baptism. Sometimes, the child is hardly recognized as existing until he has been given a name. In Gerbstadt in Mansfeld, Germany, the child before it receives its name is known as "dovedung," and, curiously enough, in far-off Samoa, the corresponding appellation is "excrement of the family-god" (517.103).

The following statement, regarding one of the American Indian tribes, will stand for many other primitive peoples: "The proper names of the Dakotas are words, simple and compounded, which are in common use in the language. They are usually given to children by the father, grandfather, or some other influential relative. When young men have distinguished themselves in battle, they frequently take to themselves new names, as the names of distinguished ancestors of warriors now dead. The son of a chief when he comes to the chieftainship, generally takes the name of his father or grandfather, so that the same names, as in other more powerful dynasties, are handed down along the royal lines" (524. 44-45).

Of the same people we are also told: "The Dakotas have no family or surnames. But the children of a family have particular names which belong to them, in the order of their birth up to the fifth child. These names are for boys, Caske, Hepan, Hepi, Catan, and Hake. For girls they are, Windna, Hapan, Hapistinna, Wanske, and Wihake."

Terms applied to Children.

An interesting study might be made of the words we apply to children in respect of size, little, small, wee, tiny, etc., very many of which, in their etymology, have no reference to childhood, or indeed to smallness. The derivation of little is uncertain, but the word is reasonably thought to have meant "little" in the sense of "deceitful, mean," from the radical lut, "to stoop" (hence "to creep, to sneak"). Curiously enough, the German klein has lost its original meaning,—partly seen in our clean,—"bright, clear." Small also belongs in the same category, as the German schmal, "narrow, slim," indicates, though perhaps the original signification may have been "small" as we now understand it; a cognate word is the Latin macer, "thin, lean," which has lost an s at the beginning. Even wee, as the phrase "a little wee bit" hints, is thought (by Skeat) to be nothing more than a Scandinavian form of the same word which appears in our English way. Skeat also tells us that "a little teeny boy," meant at first "a little fractious (peevish) boy," being derived from an old word teen, "anger, peevishness." Analogous to tiny is pettish, which is derived from pet, "mama's pet," "a spoiled child." Endless would the list of words of this class be, if we had at our disposal the projected English dialect dictionary; many other illustrations might be drawn from the numerous German dialect dictionaries and the great Swiss lexicon of Tobler.