I pass on to the old curiosity shop of popular traditions--the
nursery. Children, with their innate conservatism, have stored a
vast assemblage of odds and ends which fascinate by their very
incompleteness. Religion, mythology, history, physical science,
or what stood for it; the East, the North--those great banks of
ideas--have been impartially drawn on by the infant folk-lorists
at their nurses' knees. Children in the four quarters of the globe,
repeat the same magic formulae; words which to every grown person seem
devoid of sense, have a universality denied to any articles of faith.
What, for example, is the meaning of the play with the snail? Why is
he so persistently asked to put his horns out? Pages might be filled
with the variants of the well-known invocation which has currency from
Rome to Pekin.
English: