Part 9

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.

Puppies are different from kittens. They don’t care much about spools and strings; but they like to run about over the fields and chew up their owner’s shoes. Now the wild dogs, and their cousins the wolves, do not go out alone and hunt small animals as the cats do. They go in packs; and they hunt large animals, wild sheep, wild oxen, deer, which they chase, sometimes, for days at a time. Spools and strings, therefore, are too small potatoes for the puppy; he chases wagons, automobiles and trolley cars, playing he is hunting big game. He doesn’t creep up cautiously on a ball of yarn, not to frighten it. Instead he barks at the top of his voice to call the rest of the pack. He runs away to play with other dogs, because the dogs and wolves are social animals; and when he chews up a rubber boot, he is playing that the pack has killed a moose and he is gnawing the great leg bone.

Of course, the puppy and the kitten do not know that they are playing at hunting when they chase spools and bark at carriages, any more than a boy knows why he likes to climb trees or hit a ball with a bat. But you can see for yourselves that the difference between the play of puppies and the play of kittens is just the difference between the work of a grown cat who hunts small creatures alone, and the work of a grown up dog who hunts large creatures in company.

Not many young creatures, such as we commonly see, do so much playing as puppies and kittens, tho boys and girls do a great deal more. In fact, the wiser any animal is when it grows up, and the more it is able to do then, the more playing it does, and the more interesting games it plays, when it is small. Calves and colts and lambs do not play especially interestingly, because wild cows and horses and sheep do not do much except eat, sleep, and run away from something that threatens to eat them up. But young squirrels, kept in cages, sometimes play at burying nuts in the floor of their cages for their winter supply of food; and young beavers, kept as pets in the house, have been said to play at building dams of chairs, canes, and umbrellas, across the parlor floor. Always, however, no matter how tame the grown animal is, the kitten plays at being a wild cat, and the puppy plays at being a wild dog, and the little boy plays at being a wild Indian; all because cats and dogs and men have been tamed and civilized for only a short while, but ran wild for ages.

There is one game that we all play, children, kittens, puppies, monkeys, and I don’t know how many other young creatures—and that is make-believe fights. We do it with sticks and snow balls and wooden swords; the little animals chase one another back and forth, and pretend to bite and scratch in the fiercest manner, as if they were fighting for their lives. Most animals do have to fight for their lives, many times over; so did most men in earlier times, before we had policemen and jails, and when everybody had to look out for himself.