as the dog grows old more slowly than the mouse, and the man grows
old more slowly than the dog, so some men grow old, more slowly than
others. Some people have used up their lives and are old at fifty or
sixty; some are still young and hard at work at seventy and eighty.
Now it rests partly with ourselves which we shall be. Five is not a
large number to multiply by. But five times your present age, my
reader, will take you well up to middle life. In no small degree, it
is for you to choose whether you will come to five times your
present age with the best part of your lives over and done with, or
with the best part still to come. What, in general, your fathers and
mothers are telling you is right and teaching you to do, will
contribute to the one result; what in general they are telling you
is unwise and wrong will doom you to the other. That indeed is how
we know that some things are right and others things are wrong.
People have tried, many times over, and found out, to their profit
or to their cost.
XI
Why We Grow At All
Did you ever stop to think how extremely convenient it is to have
two parents? Mama stays at home and takes care of the little
children, reads and sings to them, tells them stories, puts them to
bed, spanks them when they are naughty and kisses them when they are
good. Indeed, you couldn’t get on very well without Mama. Neither
could you get on very well without Daddy. Daddy doesn’t seem so
important as Mama; but if Daddy didn’t go to work every day, and
earn money for Mama and their little boys and girls, where would
house and food and clothes and birthday parties and music lessons
all come from?
Suppose there were no Mamas at all, but only just Daddies. Then of
course there would be no aunties, nor nurses nor cooks nor big
sisters nor kind ladies in the next house. There would be only just
men; and half the men would have to stay home from the office to
take care of the little boys of the other half, and then their work
wouldn’t get done, and there would be no end of trouble.
It would be almost worse if there were only Mamas and no Daddies.
For then all the Mamas would have to go out to work; and even when
they could earn enough to hire a nurse, which I am afraid would not
be often, the best of nurses isn’t like Mama. So it is really much
better as it is, when we have both fathers and mothers, one to work
abroad, and the other to work at home and take care of the children.
In fact, this arrangement is so much better than any other that
pretty much all the living world has adopted it. You know the ears
of corn which we buy in August and September and eat off the cob.
You know too how it comes from the shop, all wrapped up in soft
green husks, with the long silk hanging out of the end, that little
girls in the country use for dolls’ hair, and ridiculous little boys
try to smoke in pipes. The ear is the mother corn, and the kernels
wrapped snugly away in the green husk are her children. Or rather
they are her eggs, with the little corn plants inside, almost ready
to be dried over winter and be planted and start life for
themselves. Each kernel of corn has one fibre of silk, which is
joined to it at one end and hanging out of the ear at the other.
[Illustration: The cob is the mother of the corn. Its father is
the tassel.]
The ear, then, is the mother of the corn. Its father is the tassel
at the top of the stalk. From each branch of the tassel hang many
tiny brown bags, each about as large as a grain of rice, and each
filled with a very fine brown dust. This dust is called pollen. And
unless a grain of this pollen falls on each thread of silk of each
ear, then the kernel at the other end of the thread will never grow
to full size and never become a seed; but will always remain small
like the undersized kernels at the end of the ear. If the tassel is
cut off; or the silk pulled out; or the ear tied up in a paper bag,
then the ear forms no proper seed.
Sometimes, on an ear of sweet corn, one finds a few kernels, or a
single kernel only, that instead of being white like the rest, is
yellow. This means that somewhere in the neighborhood, it may be
miles away, somebody has planted a field of common yellow corn,
which we make into corn meal, but do not eat off the cob because it
isn’t sweet. A grain or two of pollen from this yellow corn has been
carried by the wind and fallen on the silk of an ear of sweet corn.
So the father of that particular kernel is yellow and its mother
white, and the kernel is colored just as if a white woman had
married a Negro or an Indian.
Different plants manage these things differently. The ancient
Egyptians, who lived on dates much as we live on corn and wheat,
used to plant orchards of date palms as we plant orchards of our
fruits. Every year, at the time when the cultivated date trees were
in blossom, the Egyptian farmers used to go out into the desert, cut
branches from certain wild palms which never bore fruit, and carry
them in procession thru their date orchards. They did not know why
they did this. They only knew that if they omitted the ceremony for
a single year, that year they got no fruit. We know now, of course,
that the date-bearing palm is the female tree; and the wild palm
which doesn’t bear anything is the male. The procession with
branches thru the orchards simply brought in the pollen.
Most plants, on the other hand, not to take any chances, have seed
and pollen in the same flower. Many too, instead of relying on
accident and the wind to carry one to the other, are arranged so
that insects and humming-birds, in seeking food, shall make the
transfer. Some, few, however, like the willows, have seed and pollen
on separate trees.
[Illustration: Pollen Grains much enlarged.]
The water plants manage in much the same way. They, for the most
part, turn loose in the water what in them corresponds to the
pollen, and waves and currents carry it to the young seeds. The
simpler water animals, sponges and sea-anemones and shell-fish do
much the same. While the female sea-urchin or star-fish produces
eggs as small as dust, the male produces a still finer pollen-dust,
which we call milt or sperm. If one grain of this happens to float
against an egg, the egg at once begins to change to a young animal.
Otherwise after a week or so the egg dies and that is the end of it.
Of course, under these conditions, the chance of egg and milt
getting together is pretty slim, and the waste of eggs is enormous.
So the fishes, which can move about, have a much better plan. When
the female salmon, for example, swims up the rivers to leave her
eggs among the gravels in the swift water, the male goes along with
her. After she has laid her eggs and gone away, along comes her mate
and scatters milt over them. So the salmon egg is pretty sure to
grow; and the salmon can afford to have few eggs and larger, and so
give her little ones more yolk to live on and a better start in the
world.
The bees have a still better device. The single queen bee, as
everybody is supposed to know, lays all the eggs of the hive. When
the queen is young and the new swarm is just starting, she annexes
enough of this pollen-milt-sperm to last her the rest of her life,
and stores it up in a little sack. Then whenever she lays an egg,
all she has to do is to give this sack a squeeze, press out a little
of the contents, and start the egg growing into a new bee.
Strangely enough, however, altho this practice of having two parents
is so very common among both animals and plants, and so universal
among human beings, it is not, so far as we can see, at all
necessary. Potatoes are thick underground branches, and not seeds at
all. Yet we plant them and they answer exactly as well. Many lowly
creatures, like the yeasts, the bacteria, the infusorians of
stagnant water, and the like, never have anything resembling seeds
or eggs. There is a parent. The parent splits in halves. There are
two children. And where is the parent?
Among the common green plant-lice which swarm on the leaves in the
summer, the males all die early in the season. After that the
females go on laying eggs, and these hatch more females which lay
more eggs, for ten and twelve generations, before the cold weather
comes on and some of the eggs begin to hatch out males once more.
They get along exactly as well when each insect has only one parent,
as when it has two.
In the case of the queen bee, if while the egg is being laid she
squeezes the sack, then the egg hatches out a worker, which has
therefore, two parents. But if she does not, then the egg hatches
out a drone, which has only one. There are many other strange facts
of this sort, which have been known for a long time, but which
nobody has yet been able quite to understand.
Some facts still stranger have recently come to light. It has found
that in the case of many sea creatures, star-fish, sea-urchins,
shell-fish and others, that if the eggs are kept in common sea
water, but kept carefully away from any milt, they soon die, and
never grow up at all. But if any one of a considerable number of
substances is added to the water, sugar, salt, acids, and other
things, then the eggs, tho they still have only one parent, proceed
to grow into the proper sort of little sea creatures, just as if
they had two.
It is really a great mystery; the most that any one can say is that
the eggs are there, but something in the water, or the absence of
something, stops their growing. Add sugar, salt, acid, or milt and
they grow. In the case of the land animals, this something is
probably in the blood—for as you know, the blood is salt like the
sea, and in many other ways much like it.
At any rate, this is practically a most convenient arrangement. A
mother bird, for example, is herself born with all the eggs she is
ever going to lay already formed inside her. But something in her
blood keeps those eggs from growing bigger than pin heads. They
don’t grow into proper eggs, that can hatch into little birds, until
the mother bird gets a mate to help her build the nest, and to feed
the little birds when they come, and sometimes to feed her too. Then
some of them do grow up and hatch; and the two old birds take care
of them.
But as I said, it is all a very great mystery, which the wisest men
do not yet completely understand, and little boys and girls can
hardly expect to understand at all.
XII
Things That Do Not Have To Be Learned
So far in this book, we have been learning about the body. We know
something about the wonderful life-jelly of which all living things
are made—how it is itself the soft parts of plants and animals, and
how it builds for itself the hard shell and bones and wood, which
are its supports and its tools. We know, also, something about how
each particular animal or plant or human being starts as a minute
fleck of this life-jelly, grows to be, first a seed or an egg, and
then a full grown animal, a man, or a tree. We know, too, something
of the living bricks which build the bodies of living creatures; and
something of the difference between young creatures and old ones.
More than this, I trust, we have learned that all this curious
information is not to be looked at merely as something interesting
or amusing; but that like all the teachings of science, it is
something that will help us to live wisely. For as we come to know,
we ought also to learn to do; and while we are finding out something
about living things, we ought also to be finding out something about
living.
We have, I say, thus far been learning about our bodies. Now we
shall turn to a still more important part of us, and try to learn
something about our minds. Our bodies, we found, are very much
indeed like the bodies of animals and even of plants. Perhaps we
shall find that our minds also are like those of other living
things. Perhaps we shall find them to be something very different
indeed.
Most of us, I suppose, have seen at least one little baby. I don’t
mean a small baby merely, one that sits up in its carriage with a
pillow behind its back, and smiles up at you when you look in under
the hood. I mean a real little baby, a week or two old, that can’t
turn its head over on the pillow or put its hands anywhere in
particular, and instead of being nice and pink, is as red as a
little beet—for the little baby’s skin is so very thin that it uses
it to breath thru, to help out its poor little lungs, just as the
frogs and other water creatures which have lungs breath thru the
skin also. You know the size of baby I mean; if you haven’t had any
younger brothers and sisters, there must at least have been
something like it in the next house.
Now there are several very strange facts about such little babies,
of which by no means the least strange is this: If you take such a
very weak and tiny creature, just able to move its arms and legs,
and put a finger or a small stick across the palm of its hand, the
little one will grip so hard that you will have no small difficulty
in getting its fingers loose again. In fact, some babies will
actually allow themselves to be lifted in this way; and will hang by
their hands a minute or more before they will flop down again into a
helpless heap.
So here is one thing that the wee baby can do better than he can
when he gets to be older and a good deal stronger, and better
sometimes than he will ever be able to do it again. It is something,
too, that he did the first time he tried, didn’t have to learn,
didn’t have to practice, didn’t have to do anything but just be born
knowing how. Pity we can’t all get our geography lessons and our
piano practice done this easy way!
There are not a few other things which we all did exactly right the
first time, without ever being shown how, or practicing, or seeing
anyone else. For instance, when we were very young indeed, and very
small, about as young and small, in fact, as people ever get,
somebody gave us our first drink of water. We were not a day old
then; and we didn’t even know enough to look at the same point with
both eyes at once, but let them straggle off, one eye looking at one
thing and the other at another, so that both got generally mixed up
and couldn’t make out much of anything. But we knew all about
drinking. We shut our little mouths tight round the stopper of our
bottle, and sucked away like little steam pumps. The water went down
the front of our throats, crossed over to the back, and went into
our thirsty tummies. Meanwhile, our breath went in at our noses,
down into the back of our throats, crossed over to the front, and
went down our wind-pipes. But tho wind and water had to go crosswise
of the same passage, we never made a mistake, and opened or shut the
wrong lid for the wrong fluid, so as to let the air into our
stomachs or the water into our lungs. Which really, when you
consider how young we were, and how this was the first drink we ever
took, was decidedly clever of us.
An act of this sort, which we are born knowing how to do and do
right the first time without ever practising or being taught, is
called an instinct. Mighty handy, too, they are, these instincts.
Think what would happen to a baby that didn’t have the sucking
instinct, and couldn’t take a spoonful of water nor a drop of milk
till somebody had explained about drinking and showed him how to
swallow without letting it run down the wrong way. I don’t believe
there would be much chance of that baby’s ever growing up. To be
sure, the other instinct that makes the little baby grip so hard on
one’s finger, really, isn’t any particular use to him in these days.
Long, long ago, nevertheless, when our ancestors were wild men and
only half human, the little baby had to cling to its mother when she
ran thru the forest with the wild beasts chasing her. Then if the
little baby couldn’t hang on tight, it was pretty likely to get
eaten up. But the babies that clung to their mothers, while their
mothers were climbing a tree with both hands, and so couldn’t hold
on to them, these babies lived to grow up, and the memory of that
far away time still lingers in each little baby’s grip.
Some things are so important that one really has to know them. Did
you ever think why girls like to play with dolls and boys do not?
Why, on the other hand, boys can throw stones and girls cannot?
Girls like to play with dolls, because when they grow up to be women
and have real babies of their own, these babies have got to be
dressed and fed and washed and tended and taken care of when they
are sick. All this is very hard work indeed, about as hard and
trying work as anybody ever has to do; so that if your own
particular mama did not have a natural and instinctive love in her
heart for all babies, she would not have jumped up at night every
time you cried, no matter how cold and sleepy she was. If taking
care of little babies were just plain work, to be done no better
than other sorts of work are done, it would be pretty unpleasant for
the babies. So women are made to love babies so much that even when
they are little girls they like to play at taking care of doll
babies, in default of real ones. But boys and men, they don’t count;
so they do not have this taking-care-of-babies-and-dolls instinct.
But the boys and men can throw things, because before the invention
of guns (which really was not very long ago) and before men lived in
cities and planted crops, about the only way to get anything to eat
was to get out and throw something at an animal and kill it. Then,
too, when there was a war (and this often used to be most of the
time) the fighting had to be done with spears and swords, which had
to be thrown, or else used to strike and thrust with, which is
pretty much the same thing as throwing. So it happened that for ages
upon ages before our ancestors became civilized, while the women
stayed at home and took care of the children, the men went out and
threw things. And that is why today, girls like to play with dolls,
but boys like to hunt and fish; and why boys can throw stones, and
girls can’t.
Boys, then, are born with the throwing instinct. Throwing is as easy
for them to learn as walking. But girls haven’t it. For them
learning to throw is as hard as learning to walk on the hands. So we
see how both with walking and throwing, the inborn instinct makes
learning easy, tho it does not altogether take the place of
practice.
XIII
Why We Like Certain Things
We have seen that the reason why all proper little girls like to play
at taking care of dolls is that their mothers, and their grandmothers,
and their great-grandmothers, and their great-great-grandmothers, and
all other sizes of grandmothers for a thousand generations, and after
that for another thousand, and after that nobody knows how many more,
have all been taking care of real babies, until anything that looks
like a baby has become about the most interesting and precious thing
there is. We have seen also that boys learn to throw things easily, and
like to throw things because all the while that their many times
great-grandmothers have been taking care of the children, their many
times great-grandfathers have been throwing spears and javelins at
other people’s ancestors, or at things to eat running about on four
legs.
Every proper boy likes to hunt and fish and camp out and play Indian
because the most of mankind, up to a few centuries ago, have spent
their entire time in hunting, fishing, living in huts, and generally
playing Indians. Indians themselves, of course, play Indians all the
time; and up to the beginning of the Christian era, our own
ancestors, living in the wilds of northern Europe, were about as
wild as Indians, and did little except play Indians all their lives.
Who knows but that, a thousand years from now, after men have been
civilized for a long while, and been getting their livings many
years standing at benches or sitting at desks, all proper boys will
think it great fun to study out of a book indoors? Perhaps they may;
but I think it will be a long time first!
Every proper boy, too, when he gets old enough (and that is not so
very old) likes to play at games. Now pretty much all these games,
when you come to think of it, baseball, cricket, hockey, tennis,
golf, I don’t know how many more, all involve hitting a ball with a
stick. If we like to throw balls with our hands because our wild
forebears threw javelins and spears with theirs, can you not guess
at once that the reason why we like to strike balls with sticks is
that these same wild forebears had for so many ages been striking
things with clubs and swords? We like what our ancestors had to do.
If we cannot cut and thrust and hack and throw and strike at wild
animals in the chase or at other men in battle, at least we can do
it with a ball. So bat and ball are the boy’s dolls. He plays with
them for the same excellent reason that his sister plays with hers.
But why does every proper boy like to climb, and every proper girl
too, if she has lived in the country and had a proper chance? About
the first thing most of us did, as soon as we learned to creep, was
to head for the nearest stairs, and try to climb up. When we get a
little older, we cannot so much as set eyes on a fence or a shed
roof without wanting to be on top of it; while as for trees, who of
us, at a certain age, is satisfied until he has been to the top of
every tree in the neighborhood. As for climbing mountains, that is
one of the greatest games there is. So there is a climbing instinct
in us, as well as a throwing instinct and a hit-something-with-a-bat
instinct.
Now our wild ancestors who fished and hunted and played Indians for
a living probably did not do much climbing. But long before their
day we had certain still more ancient ancestors who were only half
human and lived in the trees; and long before these, in turn, were
still older ancestors who were not human at all, but regular apes
who had hands in place of feet, and could climb like monkeys. These
spent their lives in the trees; and in memory of them, each of us in
turn, before he is quite old enough to play bat and ball games, is
possessed to climb like a monkey, and climbs almost as surely and
well.
Some people say, too, that the reason why a drowning person throws
up his hands (the very worst thing he possibly could do under the
circumstances) is that, being quite crazy with fear, he forgets
completely his surroundings, remembers only the dim and far off time
when the tree-folk escaped danger by climbing up out of the way, and
reaches up for an imaginary branch which hasn’t been there these
many thousand years. Perhaps this is so; for my part, I believe it
is. At any rate, there is the wonderful grip of the new-born babe.
Where did he get it if not by climbing trees, or clinging to his
mother when she fled with him thru the branches?
Some people say also that the reason why we like to play
hide-and-seek is that our ape ancestors, and our half-human
ancestors, and our wild ancestors, and our half civilized ancestors,
down to considerably after the time when the school histories begin,
have spent no small part of their days stealing softly upon their
enemies and the wild creatures they were hunting for food, or else
hiding all mousey quiet while some enemy or wild beast is hunting
after them.
There are a few people even who say that the reason why we like to
go in swimming (we do like it, do we not?) is that in some sort of
dim way we remember a still more ancient forebear who lived all the
time in the water, who in short, was a veritable fish and did
nothing else but swim. I don’t believe this myself. Not that we did
not have such an ancestor—there doesn’t seem to be much doubt about
that. But it all happened so very, very long ago that it doesn’t
seem possible that there should be any trace of those days left.
Still who can tell?
At any rate, we like to do a vast number of things that our
forebears had to do whether they liked them or not; and if you can
think of any other reason than this why you like baseball and
hide-and-seek and climbing and dolls, I wish you would tell me.
XIV
Animals’ Games
Now that we know why boys play with balls and bats, and girls play
with dolls, let us see if we can make out why kittens play with
strings and puppies bark after wagons.
Perhaps you have already guessed. The grown up house cat and wild
cat get a living all or in part by hunting birds and mice. They
crouch close to the ground, creep slowly upon their prey; then seize
it with a rush. That is just what the kitten does when you drag some
small object slowly across the floor. The kitten doesn’t know why it
chases a spool on a string. Really, however, it is playing at
hunting small creatures, as its ancestors have hunted them in
reality for a million generations.