of great pregnancy, as they were carved, faceted, variously colored, etc. If we extend our survey to the folklore and sym- bolism of diamonds, gold, mercury, brass, iron, crystal, flint, soil, sand, and reflect on their mystical, allegorical, and meta- physical uses, we shall realize what they have meant for phy- letic psychogenesis.
Autochthones spring directly from the bosom of the earth and feel, as Tecumseh told General Harrison, that the earth was their mother and at death they repose in her bosom. Not only are our bodies dust and to dust return, but for many primitive races the soul leads a gnome-like, subterranean exist- ence. The dead live on their pallid lives beneath our feet; affect crops and the fertility of soil; preside over mines and buried treasures; and in famine, as the Muthos of the Golden Bough shows, must be propitiated that the earth may yield again.
If we accept the Spencer-Allen view of this aspect of nature worship, that stones first became sacred because erected over graves, thus deriving their sanctity from ancestor worship, and 200 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE even myths like those of Deucalion, which make stones be- come men and therefore worshiped as their parents, we can thus see a possible origin of idolatry and can best feel whatever force there is in the extreme view, which derives the Hebrew El and our Christian God from a sacred, ancestral stone.1 So again in cosmic myths, mountains often support the heavens, although sometimes the mountain is the hollow heav- enly vault and we are inside, not outside, it.2 Atlas's head sometimes touches the North Pole. The Hindu mountain Meru is the polar home of the gods, a column joining earth and sky, the highest terrestrial spot; it goes through the earth and protrudes on the other side. The Chinese thought mountains form a more subtle substance than plain earth; and Schopen- hauer says the study and sight of them throws us into a sub- lime frame of mind. They brave decay that sweeps all else away. Mountains are often the home of the gods, or again are worshiped as themselves divine. They uphold the earth. All of Horeb was sacred, and Hermon, meaning holy, still bears the ruins of many temples. Here the Ephraimites sac- rificed, and many temples and churches have been built on sacred mountains, a catalogue of which would probably more than equal all the mountains of the earth, because, as Words- worth said, " every mountain is finest." Many a tope and pyramid is an effort to rival the mountains of nature. Buddha made pilgrimages up mountains a symbol of the renunciation of earthly comforts for hardship, and such trips are still meritorious. The phenomena of altitude favor great thoughts and suggest communion with the gods. Such places they would choose, as have many monks, especially the Benedictines. On mountains dead bodies are often exposed, and many a fictitious mountain of the imagination has pierced the heart of heaven. On their summits are found earthly paradises, per- haps wondrous gardens and fountains. The cone is a sacred symbol of the hill.
Mount Sinai is a bleak, dark granite, waterless rock, sug- gesting a moon mountain, because having no life, the center of terrible storms, an utterly unique object, an isolated accident throughout all the wide plain and Sahara desert region, and 1 See Grant Allen: Evolution of the Idea of God, chap. v.
2 O'Neill: Night of the Gods, vol. ii, chap, viii, p. 383.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 2OI altogether " one of the most singular phenomena on the sur- face of the globe." 1 In a sense, it is the mountain of Egypt; its bare rocks were centers of worship ages before the Hebrews saw it. The impression its new phenomena made, when first seen by a plain-dwelling people, was indelible. Like the sacred mountain of Japan, Olympus and many others, it was the home of deity. Veiled in cloud perhaps when he descended, the God of Sinai was a fierce deity, who brewed storms and lightning and rode on the wings of the wind, and so awful, that no one could see him and live. In his theophany, Moses must be hid in the cleft of a rock and covered with his hand and could only catch a glimpse of his back parts. Jehovah was its special local deity, and Sinai after Moses was " the basis of all the theology of the Israelites." They became now as much the people of the mountain as in the days of Ezra they became the people of the Sacred Book. The mountain phenomena per- vaded their literature and made it sublime. After the appari- tion, it became their Parnassus and Olympus in one. The children of Israel left it filled with awe, terror, and faith in the awful power of the deity, who made the earth shake and dwelt in a pavilion of clouds. Finally, the judgment would be ushered in by mountain phenomena.
The mind of children is still replete with fancies about stones. They collect luckies, carry them everywhere, and boast where they have been, keep them warm, sometimes in cotton; think sand is baby stones, plant and water them to see if they grow, take them apart from piles that they may not press each other, will not step on them, fish them out of the fire and water, that they may feel more comfortable, give them dirt and sand to eat, believe they rain down or come up from the ground because they are so much more abundant after a shower, pity the little or ugly ones, think them sociable and perhaps put them together, give them names, talk to them, regard rocks as friendly or hostile, protecting or silent wit- nesses who could tell, regard them as related if alike, think they appreciate, have moral qualities and are sympathetic, and often regard them as fetishes.2 1 Renan: History of the People of Israel, chap. xiv.
2 Fetishism in Children, by G. Harold Ellis; Fed. Sem., June, 1902, vol. ix, 52 202 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE For youth this rarely survives even in the realm of play and " make-believe," although for some it lingers through life.1 Our data show the following typical changes: i, A sense of the great age or perdurability of stones and rocks comes with the expansion of the time sense; 2, there is a very marked rise of the curve of interest in precious stones and deepened appreciation of their beauty and their different characteristics, often with new superstitions; 3, the rare and distant are more valued; 4, the carrying power of association is enhanced, and mementoes and keepsakes have more meaning and are more cherished; 5, monuments, and yet more mountains, are now first really both comprehended and felt, the size of the latter being too great for the child mind; 6, rock and earth come to be the symbol of reality, solid substantiality, and matter gen- erally; and lastly, collections of them are not merely amassed, but ordered and grouped with far more mentality and zest for classification.
Geology and physical geography, the percentages of stu- dents in both of which are decreasing in our high schools, are too dehumanized for want of contact with folklore, scenery, landscapes, charts, and pictures, and the dynamic and historical elements. Paleontology, full of suggestion of the great age of the world, is encumbered with details and technical names, and forgets that growth is analytic in the sense that large views and aperqus should come first. Petrography and crystallogra- phy can be made impressive if taught by a full mind, which alone can elementarize well. So too, later, mining, metallurgy, economic, commercial, and industrial processes precede classi- fication and technique in the order of nature and mental growth. The study of glaciers, beaches, ripple-marks, old volcanoes, hill-top views, collections, excursions, and above all, talks, which is the method of the real teacher charged with two interests, that in the subject and in the youth, these are the only beginnings of this age that do not disenchant.
X. A change I am coming to regard as at the same time one of the most characteristic, suggestive, and beautiful, in pubes- cent years, is in the new relation to flowers and plants. Before, both the psychic qualities ascribed to them and the impressions 1 Gould: Child Fetishes. Fed. Sem., vol. v, p. 421.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 203 they make upon the child are predominantly, frankly, and naively in the physical realm of sense. From the data of Alice Thayer l and others, we can now roughly describe these changes in the several senses most involved. Children love to fondle and feel of flowers, and some can hardly keep their hands off every flower in the garden. They are often toys, and played with as dolls, pets, dishes, soldiers, and money; are made into wreaths, girdles, necklaces, and gaudy trimmings, and their petals are soft to " poor " and stroke. The hateful ones are those that sting, prick, are pitchy, or leave stains; or, again, it hurts them to be trampled, plucked, etc. But with the teens they are often caressed, pressed against the cheeks, neck, lips, and kissed, and the face is buried in them. Their coolness and more often the velvety softness of their petals and their fragrance is mentioned. This is more common with favorite flowers or those with associations with loved persons, places, or incidents, while reluctance to touch indifferent or disliked flowers is also more pronounced and relations to the other senses more satisfying.
Smell, though dominant before puberty as mediating likes and dislikes in a purely sensuous way, is now a very strong factor, in the appeal of flowers, far more subjective. Its irra- diation widens more and more. Odor becomes almost the soul of flowers. It is an index to the human attributes which now the flowers seem to possess, and much of their symbolism is in large part suggested by this deepened sense. By their fragrance flowers suggest crime, death, funerals, the sick- room, weddings, commencement, churches, Easter time, spring, the cool woods, solitude, the running brook, the open fields, sunshine, summer and harvest scenes, festive occasions, love in all its many forms, may bring joy, depression, pensive- ness, or voluptuous sensations that make it almost wicked to enjoy the fragrance of some. Malodorous flowers, perhaps, seem morally bad, their odors bespeak a gentle, sweet, or ugly disposition, those with pleasant odors are friendly. Disagree- able odors are harder to overcome. A young man met and smelled of a wild rose unexpectedly in a field, and, with no conscious process, found himself crying, and only after some 1 An article soon to appear in the Fed. Sem, 204 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE time could recall that years ago his mother, now dead, called him in the doorway as he stood at that spot. Thus they may scent the very heart, " their breath make sweet a world of pain," " their censers with faint odors swinging/' or, again, they may fret the nostrils and through them the soul with fetid and nauseous exhalations.
So, too, their color flames more inwardly at this age, sug- gesting blood, fire, sky, snow, and January fields, solitude and sociability, precious stones, sunlight, flashes of glittering gold (although most hated flowers are yellow). Chromatic likes and dislikes unfold a complex symbolism. White means purity ineffable; red, pleromal life and love, and is of the heart; purple is regal. Colors seem more intense, and there is something mystically, transcendently real behind them. Their relations make whole symphonies of harmony or painful discords.
Taste seems least of all changed, while bad tastes do not so immediately blight beauty. Plants and flowers that are medicinal, poisonous, or edible, tend to be excluded from the esthetic sphere, as use and beauty grow apart. These changes, however manifest, are slight compared with others. To the child flowers live and die, grow, sleep, are tired, sick, feel hunger, thirst, and temperature. They are loved because they are bright, pretty, or fragrant. Their wounds may even be bandaged; there are prayers and thanks for rain for their sake. Some would like to become flowers, but the corrective thought is that they die soon or are neglected, alone, out nights, and so children would be like them, the motive being that they are loved or caressed by some one whose good-will they wish to obtain, or because they are beautiful, or they would be as pure, sweet, and good as the flowers. In Plato's figure, man is him- self a plant of heavenly parentage, and the child is in the vegetative stage.
With adolescence, the flower world slowly acquires a new, far more diversified and inward meaning. Tangibility and sense are less, and subjective resonance more. Their relations become more internal and they have psychic more than physical bearings upon human life. While many previous tendencies are developed, others are shed, and we meet the frequent phrases " suggest," " seem like," " stand for," " speak of," for ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 205 both the nascent and the decadent responses of the soul. The number of cultivated as distinct from wild flowers, especially for city children, that are known and also that are both liked and disliked, increases. There is a new sense for form and shape. Individual preferences come out. Crass forms of fancy slowly yield to sentiment, and early fictions are no longer believed but are felt, and their effects persist as if they had been absorbed and had fertilized the heart. The pure animism of the child fades, though it may persist as a feeling in a deepened sense. Some are perplexed to find hateful and lovely qualities in the same flower, or pity those sweet in scent but ugly in form or color.
As to language, for the child flowers nod or shake yes or no, whisper with squeaky voices in peepy mouths like fairies in disguise, asking for 'water or care, have a speech for each other, and when alone at night or in the moonlight, perhaps, are heard to say, " Do not tread on us," ''' Take me with you," " Love, or be like us," " Spring is here," " Be happy," " We come out from nature for you." They at least try to say some- thing very sweet in a silent language, or they sigh, sing, sob, have delectable things they could say, are voluble to bees, birds, trees, and grass. But while the average pubescent no longer hears or believes in vocal speech, he holds all the more to a higher symbolic communion. Their motions are full of grace, beckoning and gesture. They are seers revealing the real heart of nature to us. They meditate, sympathize, are hard or easy to get acquainted with, incite to mischief, solitude, joy, or pathos. They " burn with a mystical love," and every bud and leaf is full of dreams. Their speech is in a tongue no one exactly knows, but which in certain moods comes home to every heart. They teach lessons of virtue and usefulness and incite to noble lives. A bouquet is a mute letter. At such times when we are wise in the rhythm of blossom and leaf, they tell wondrous secrets to those whom they love and who love them, but it is all in the dialect in which the wind and the sun and rain murmur to the seed-corn in the dark ground of the coming harvest, or of the scythe to the grass. " Hush and heed not, for all things pass," or in which the daisy wishes to say, " I am the star of the day."
Flowers have their own friendships and enmities. In gen- 206 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE eral they love bees and butterflies but hate noxious parasitic insects, ants, hens, and weeds, and dread large animals that eat or injure them. Some invite birds, protect other flowers, or are protected by trees, nestle together affectionately in beds. They are friends to good people, and rebuke evil. Wild flowers are savages or unkempt street urchins friendly to animals, and perhaps to bad people. The homely are jealous of the pretty ones, and the small ones love the protection of the large. Thistles, thorns, and poison, malodorous and shabby plants, are criminals in the flower world. The rose, e. g., is an enemy of the lilac, but loves the violet; the daisy is jealous of the buttercup's golden calyx, and all the flowers are jealous of the daisy's white frill.
Many flowers, too, in their appearance suggest birds or ani- mals. Some have all the human features; the pansy is a little face to almost everyone, a sweet and innocent baby face, a roguish child, sly, cute, and mischievous, or even the face of a cross old woman.
Again, the human attributes of flowers are no longer found in physical analysis, but they both acquire and suggest moral qualities. They teach or illustrate modesty, humility, meek- ness, resignation, content, cheer, gentleness, serenity, purity, perfection, candor, honesty, sensitiveness, elegance, sweetness, piety, as they look up to heaven and pray, etc. Some are ?3old, selfish, gaudy, bedizened, brazen, ill-tempered, unsocial, reserved, fierce, full of fire and of red blood, pert, jaunty, affected, coarse, old-fashioned. Others are dainty, true, cour- teous, reserved, snobbish, coxcomb-like, stupid, clumsy, quick- tempered, frail, cross, barbaric or overrefined, greedy, and selfish. Some suggest golden-haired children, some fussy and prim old ladies in frills and flounces, some roistering young blades, some helpless, new-born babes, or soldiers, nuns, queens. The qualities assigned to different flowers, while varying considerably with different individuals, have much general similarity, but each has its dispositions and its own sphere of suggestiveness. The lily, violet, and rose, for ex- ample, are especially replete with deep significance. In all these many ways, too, the appeal in adolescent years is notice- ably much fuller and far more suggestive in the case of girls than with boys.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 207 Two typical illustrations must suffice. One is from a country girl of thirteen, who was passionately fond of pansies, and each blos- som was given a name, generally that of a quality. They were love, charity, humility, sweetness, envy, pride, goody, sweetie, dearie, birdie, etc.; each preserved its own individuality and name, and when one died the latter was never given to another individual, but a new name was sought. Occasionally playmates' names were used, from fancied resemblance, or names of characters in stories she had heard, and usually everything was suggested by resemblance. She was very fond of keeping school and teaching or reproving each indi- vidual pansy. Sometimes she preached to them and exhorted them to be good, to avoid certain faults, to rise early, and be clean. Some- times they were sick and in need of special treatment, of water or shel- ter. If the nights were cool they must be protected, that they might sleep warmly. Occasionally romances and characteristics far more definite than those suggested by the names were given.
The other is the case of a young lady about twenty. For her the rose is, e. g., an ideal madam craving perfection and claiming homage from all the rest; the violet is a universal favorite, and for children, es- pecially those who are much alone and in the country, and like so many others, is very companionable. It is affectionate, huggable, " loves you, and turns its face toward you," as if craving a kiss; is the home- maker, shading and hiding itself under and never without its leaves, from which it is almost indecent to separate it. The daisies are " faces but with souls behind them "; geraniums are " honest poor persons in bright calico"; pinks are pretty but soulless, all color; calla-lilies are the most stately, generally unmarried vestals; the tiger-lily is " a priestess of Africa, gaudy, and, like all lilies, stately and craving ad- miration with an almost processional dignity "; the lilac is hardly hu- man, strongly but somewhat vulgarly odorous; the buttercup is very human, but virginal; the hyacinth is " hardly a true flower, but ar- tificial, waxy, or snowy "; the tulip is mainly color, as the honey- suckle is mainly perfume; the sweet pea is " besouled, but of a light butterfly character "; the peony is " married, like the rose, but less refined and spiritual, more undeveloped, but vital and robust on a low plane "; the forget-me-not is " a dear, sweet, young country girl "; the morning-glory is " simply pretty, conceited perhaps, a grisette and overconscious "; the dahlia is " married, but at heart an old maid "; the chrysanthemum has " traveled, and has a foreign air, with a highly individualized and perhaps conceited soul ''; the arbutus is " an Indian girl, brought up to play shyly and hide in the forest "; the snow- ball is not a flower, though a distant friend of the peony; the anemone is morbidly delicate, " too good for this earth," can hardly be picked without being lain out delicately; the aster has its own soul, and is " on speaking terms with the daisy, but on a lower plane of life "; the sunflower is a gaudy but ineffably conceited creature; the lady's-slip- per is a "thoroughbred fairy"; the cactus is made of wax; Jack-in- the-pulpit, equisetse, cattails, and goldenrods are often conceived as 208 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE male flowers, while all the rest are female. The poppy is " a brilliant, dashing brunette "; the hollyhock aspires to perfection, like the lily, and though much more lowly, serves like it in the temple; the mignon- ette is a simple child; the verbenas make good children to keep school with; the water-lily is another " sacred princess, and its pads are prayer-mats "; the cowslip is the male of the buttercup; the thistle is a regal, married Irishwoman; the gentian, a beautiful and ideal old maid; the yarrow, an " honest farmer in brown overalls," etc.
Why this strange fascination for flowers? Why does this new rapport increase at adolescence when the immediate inter- est of sense begins to abate? Flowers were not developed for man, who has had little agency in their fertilization. Their beauty was meant to appeal to bees and other insects. Perhaps it is in part because woman first domesticated them, but so she did most animals, for which her feeling was very different; and why her peculiar fondness that first led her to cultivate them? I believe it to be at root because of the fact, now more or less overlaid and lost to modern consciousness, that she feels, as also does man in a duller way, that flowers are the best expression nature affords of her adolescence, that from the efflorescence of dawning puberty to full maturity she is a flower in bloom, and that till the petals fall they are the ex- ternal type of her virginity, and so they remain ever afterward the memento of her unfallen paradise. Poetry is often only a mature expression of the ideas and sentiments of childhood, which are vastly older and truer to nature than those of adults, and with this key we can better understand the pathos of the rose, which has been in all the historic period a favorite theme of poetry.1 This sheds light on the frequency of flower names for girls common everywhere. The general term for woman in Malay is flower.
For the genetic psychologist, Fechner's Nanna, or, The Soul Life of Plants, lately republished, is of interest here.2 He as- sumed a psychic continuity throughout the universe. The spirit that besouled the universe was mostly under the threshold of consciousness, human minds being specialized apexes which 1 See an anthology on this subject in Rosa Rosarum Exhorto Poetarum, by E. V. B. Also, The Pathos of the Rose, in J. A. Symonds's Essays, vol. i, p. 187.
2 Nanna, oder iiber das Seelenleben der Pflanzen, von Gustav T. Fechner Second ed., Leipzig, 1899.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 209 cropped out, but it had a larger though obscurer expression in plants and in planets. The former have an individual con- sciousness but only slightly unfolded, but this rests back on a higher one without losing its individuality by so doing. This parallelism is universal. The Clytie metamorphosis was a myth of the special relations between the vegetable world and that of man. Nanna, Balder's widow, was a German goddess and better suggests this than Flora, whom he condemns to herbaria.1 The plant world is far vaster and older than man or perhaps even than animals, and vernacular names are of the highest antiquity and connect flowers with animals, stars, ancient gods, Christ, angels, historic persons, fairies, Naiads, elves, Puck, demons, trolls, witches, medicine, magic, are wrought into proverbs, festivals, calendars, and many miraculous plants have been invented as if there was once a full florigraphic lan- guage. " Could we penetrate to the original suggestive idea that called forth the name it would bring valuable information about the first openings of the human mind toward nature, and the merest dream of such a discovery invests with strange charm the words that could tell, if we could understand, so much of the forgotten infancy of the human race." 2 Flower lore shows still further what they have meant in the early world. These names and lore are also woman's work. No- where has she been more original or creative. The plant world 1 If, he says in substance, we could invert things and set plants upon the throne of the earth and we become plants, we should be inclined to ask what these restless human bipeds were running about for and whether they had any use save to serve vegetative life. We, the plant men, would continue, remain in dignified rest in our own place, and need do nothing save to spread out our roots and leaves in order to receive all divine gifts as our due in tribute. Men live to prepare carbonic acid for our breath, and die only that their decaying bodies may furnish us nitrogen. Men have to cultivate us in flower-pots and gardens, field and forest, and yet we con- sume them in the end. If we wish to send our bacterial army in their blood, we exterminate them, and although they take a small part of our fruit and leaves, it is only to spread and fertilize our seeds. Insects as far outnumber men as our leaves do insects, and yet even they serve us as love messengers to bring the pollen of our blossoms to fertile corollas.
2 English Plant Names. Also Folklore of Plants, by T. F. Thiselton Dyer, chap. xx. Flowers and Flower-Lore, by Hilderic Friend, p. 353 et seq. Also Folkard: Plant-Lore, Legends, and Lyrics, chaps, xiii, xiv, and xv. Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft, London, 1871.
210 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE she has used as her own private pass-key to the universe. In some such view as Fechner's her natural religion would have its intellectual expression, as if a garden were her primal home, her paradise still revisited as in a dream, in the normal psy- choses of these years which should be forever sacred to senti- ment and intuition so instinct with the best that has been in the past. There is something here which ages of past utilities can not account for, even if some of them do tend to be in- herited as esthetic effects. Perhaps beauty to us was all once religion or love.