Thus modern youth is coming out of the forest and away from its influence. Most of its ancestral effects upon his soul are becoming more rudimentary, and there is much in his en- vironment that, if it does not actually score away early den- dritic influence, at least tends to indifference. But while this is the general law it is not without limitation and important exceptions. He may become more susceptible to the literature of antiquity, that fancied woodland scenes with fauns and dryads, tropes of sap or blood, milk, wine, the evergreens or trees of life, and the symbolism of oak, aspen, palm, California big trees, cypress, lotus, banyan, and many others which he has, and perhaps more that he has never, seen. Class and historic trees, those owned or set out, can acquire much zest. The grand myths of celestial or universe trees and their mazes of allegory, as well as family trees and pedigrees, may impress and even instruct him. But like Arbor Day, poetic anthologies of the " Woodman-spare-that-tree " order, and even the tree raptures of the modern field naturalist, or the wisdom of tree botany, are likely to be in too large measure adult-made or school-bred artifacts that strike no deep root in the soul. Very vital to him, however, are the influences of the forest in solitude. In its stillness and awe his thoughts are lifted upward, his soul ex- pands, awe, reverence, expectation, poise, make it the very temple of the natural religion of the heart. The lessons of life and death, growth, age, and decay come home. Anything might appear or happen to his quickened fancy. He thinks inevitably of God, love, destiny, and his future. The wood voices will bring out atavistic echoes which put him into un- witting communion with his remote forebears and evoke latent mythopeic tendencies otherwise mute. If he is ever to have a muse, it is here she may first appear to him. For many it is perhaps a little too solemn and tame, but every youth should be exposed to these sylvan influences in spring, fall, summer- tide, and winter, for thus all that is best in his nature will ripen and gain ascendency. Thus adolescence can never do all its work without an occasional day alone in a city of trees.
220 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE XII. Some think the best approach to psychology is the study of the instincts and life history of animals. However this be, this is the natural beginning of zoology, which has hitherto been so devoted to the study of anatomical form and growth-stages that its representatives have grown not only incompetent or unwilling to start aright, but have lost the peda- gogic sense of how to do so. To the young child, there is no gap between his soul and that of animals. They feel, think, act, much as he does. They love, hate, fear, learn, sleep, make toilets, sympathize, and have nearly all the basal psychic qual- ities that the child has. Indeed, we might almost define the animal world as consisting of human qualities broken up and widely scattered throughout nature and as having their highest utility in teaching psychology to the young by a true peda- gogical method. The pig, e. g., to one who knows its habits and therefore what piggish means, is a symbol not only of impetuous greed in eating and gross selfishness, but also of filth and untidiness, which gives the child a better conception and a truer reaction to all that these qualities mean in the world of man. To say of a woman that she is a butterfly or a pea- cock, describes traits which it would take a long time to explain to one who was not familiar with these forms of animal life. In the same way the goose, the fox, the eel, the lion, bulls and bears, the eagle, dove, jay, cuckoo, hawk, pelican, crow, serpent, gazelle, cormorant, badger, wolf, tiger, ele- phant, alligator, fish, the frog, tadpole, chrysalis and its meta- morphoses, the bee, ant, wasp, the sloth, insects, the ape, hiber- nation, migration, nest-building, and scores more, are psycho- logical categories or qualities embodied and exaggerated so that we see them writ large and taught object-lesson wise, to those who live at a stage when character is being molded and influenced pro or con in each of these directions. More than one thousand editions of Reynard the Fox are enumerated and its lessons entered into all the great discussions of centuries, for it is perhaps the best of all the JEsop class in which the animal •fdbleanx were a language of man's moral nature. We might add a long list of more or less mythic animals, the leviathan, phenix, dragons, centaurs, or popular misconceptions of animal traits, while children's fancy in creating impossible new ani- mals is still almost as fecund as Nature herself. Therefore, we ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 221 plead for menageries, for collections of animals in every public park, pets, familiarity with stables, for school museums of stuffed specimens, and for the flora and fauna of the neighbor- hood in every schoolhouse, to say nothing of instruction in every school concerning insects, birds, and animals which are noxious and those which are helpful to vegetation, fruit, and agriculture generally. The story of the gipsy-moth, the phyl- loxera, the caterpillar, the tobacco-worm, the life history and habits of other parasites in the bark or on the leaf, in seed or pulp, the marvelous habits of the botfly, the angle-worm, through whose body all our vegetable mold has so often passed, the common house fly with its interesting story, the grub, the wire-worm, moth and bat, the food fishes, the peach- tree borer, the apple aphis, the tent makers, and many other fas- cinating living creatures* which have been so carefully studied of late in our agricultural colleges, all these have a moral as well as a scientific interest to childhood and constitute a kind of knowledge which has an educational, to say nothing of an' economic, value, and which must be ranked as one of the very highest.
Many animals excel man in certain qualities of sensation, instinct and physical development, so that even the adult is often looking up and studying higher qualities than his own in learning of animals and their ways. They are not only our older brothers, but fit in some respects to be our teachers. Man's supremacy in the world consists in the fact that the qualities in which he excels animals are more numerous than those in which he is inferior to them, and that certain of these qualities are developed in him to a high and perhaps even ex- cessive degree. The unfoldment of these, however, comes late in his own development, and those which most distinguish him from animals are added last, so that arrest in the critical later stages of adolescent development condemns him to pass through life deficient in just those traits which are most char- acteristically human.
Children thus in their incomplete stage of development are nearer the animals in some respects than they are to adults, and there is in this direction a rich but undiscovered silo of educational possibilities which heredity has stored up like the coal-measures, which when explored and utilized to its full 222 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE extent will reveal pedagogic possibilities now undreamed of. The domestication of the two or three hundred animal species, as history shows, has largely been the product of this sym- pathy with the brute mind and life, and if it be true, as is claimed, that most of all these animals have been tamed by woman, this is only another illustration of the fact that her life and mind are more generic than that of man. Even the children's instinctive fears of animals, insects, etc., that are often harmless, show not only how old and close the relation between man and beast has been in the past, despite the great evolutionary chasm caused by the loss of whole series of miss- ing links, but supply the other chief ingredient of interest which is most intense where fear and the love which casts it out are battling for supremacy, for, as I have elsewhere shown, our souls in infancy are scarred with ancient fears as of big eyes, teeth, fur.1 This stratum is one of the very richest layers in paleopsychic development, and its outcrops in the many varied zoolatries of savage life, which show its strength, con- stitute one of the most interesting illustrations of the way in which the stages of a child's development repeat those through which the race has passed.
All this may be concisely illustrated by studies of the child's relations to the two commonest household pets. Brehm says, " We can not conceive savage man without the dog," and Longkanel adds, " The dog is a part of man himself." 2 It was an important factor in helping him to supremacy. Some northern races would now cease to exist without it, as the prairie Indians vanished with the buffalo. It is most com- pletely domesticated and has entered most deeply and sympa- thetically into man's psychic life. It has been a specialty in art, for Landseer has been called the " Shakespeare of dogs," and the world would be poorer without the story of Gelert and the famous dogs of literature and history from Homer's Argus down. It was already domesticated in paleolithic days. Dogs have been close companions of great men, and for nearly a quarter of a century a French society has conferred a colleur d'honneur upon dogs for acts of signal merit. Although do- 1 See my Fears, sees, xii-xv, incl. 1 Quoted from Bucke.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 223 mestication probably early interfered with dog totemism, their superiority to man in the power of scent, orientation, speed, their patience with children, companionship in play and hunt- ing, dulness among races that use them chiefly for food, their hardiness, diseases, tricks, etc., all suggest improvement by association with man and participation in the advantages of civilization. While some writers fear or rebuke too much sen- timent about or interest in them, others think far more might be done in communicating with and training them than has even yet been dreamed of.
Their attention to small children is often almost un- bounded and they are their companions in every aspect of their life, share their food and perhaps their bed, are their play- fellows, are talked to and partake of all their confidences, are taught their lessons, arc thought to understand all, are loved because of their smooth, soft, and shaggy coats, color, lively actions, and are often treated with full recognition of the qual- ities in which they excel man. Children are credulous and un- critical about the most remarkable dog stories, are anthropo- morphic and chummy. As Mr. Bucke shows, on the basis of 2,804 returns, at or soon after puberty important characteristic changes of attitude toward the dog occur. Boys' interest in hunting and coursing qualities rises sharply, and the hound is invested with and reflects a new interest and takes him afield. Fighting qualities are much more appreciated, dog fights more absorbing and often cultivated not only instinctively on occa- sions, but promoted and prepared for, while the bulldog be- comes a hero and an object-lesson, and perhaps an inspirer of pluck, courage, gameness, perseverance, and sometimes has a marked influence on the boy's life and disposition for a time. Again, there is a new interest in the dog's intelligence, and the boy not only values but teaches tricks and boasts of the mental qualities and sagacious acts of his pet. This is illustrated by the downward curve. There is also a new interest in breeds and pedigrees. The quality of different species is discussed with psychologic acumen, and points about eyes, mouth, teeth, tail, and shape generally, and also the money value of favorites are foci of attention. While the superstitions of childhood are out- grown, credulity about general intelligence is for some time unabated. Finally, sexual differences are sharply developed, 224 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE girls preferring St. Bernards, for their size, strength, protec- tion, and the sense of dependence they foster, as well as for the romance that attaches to them, greyhounds for their elegance, or poodles for their beauty, and little dogs generally, and being more prone to decorate with embroidered blankets, orna- mental collars, ribbons, and more sensitive to any hardship and cruelty they suffer. They are more interested in face and feature than in general form, in cleanliness, bath, toilets, and sometimes in dog hospitals, regimen, hygiene, and diet, teach- ing them to eat ice-cream and confectionery, etc. Not one in all Bucke's returns shows interest in the dog's anatomy by a single mention. For youth, they still have almost every psychic qual- ity of man, but their limitations and arrest or inferiority are also more clearly recognized. In view of all, Bucke argues that every child and youth should have a dog for the moral and psychological education they would bring their masters. In a well-known western summer school every boy is given a horse, and the work of the season consists chiefly in caring for, training, using, and studying the horse; so the dog teaches loyalty, reverence, and fidelity, which illustrate the very ideal of man's relation to God, as well as patience, sympathy, good-will, companionship, occupation that keeps from mis- chief, and the sense of responsibility that ownership can teach. To this end also the dog should be studied more systematically and scientifically. In respect to this animal the average child should repeat somewhat more fully the history of the race.
The cat represents the great family of Felidse, the larger members of which have long been very dangerous to man. Morbid fears and phobias of cats by both children and adults, of its eyes in the dark, of exceptional acts, sizes, colors, and the many uncanny superstitions and proverbs about them and their association with witchcraft suggest both that man's old fear of this genus has not subsided and also that the cat is not yet fully domesticated. In a careful statistical study Mr. C. E. Browne 1 shows that most cats get lost, run away, or easily relapse toward the feral state, and that the cat in many house- holds is found or rescued by the still active domesticating in- stincts of children. In the lives of young children the cat plays 1 The Cat and the Child. Fed. Sem., Macen, 1904, vol. xi, p. 4.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 225 an important role. It is ceremonially named, often with epi- thets designating its form, acts, or traits, as names are given by our Indian tribes, or to dolls. It sings, scolds, swears, smiles, laughs, talks, saying words and sentences, has its own code of conduct to which it must be trained with many penal- ties, is bad or good in many ways or degrees. It pities, appre- ciates care, is sorry, cross, understands, is moody, and finis felis often means tears and elaborate funerals. At all ages, but far more so as puberty approaches, the cat is the girl's pet as the dog is the boy's. Boys' interest in cats as fighters, however, rises very rapidly through the early teens, that of the girls rather declining. Puberty at first seems to augment in both sexes the feeling that the cat really " says things," although this new sympathy soon declines. Despite its cruelty to birds, etc., it pities more, seems more musical, etc., just in proportion as the child's own psychic life expands. But even with girls interest in this pet after an initial increase is greatly reduced again by the middle teens. The varieties of punishment are less and there is less zest in disciplining it. It eats, sleeps, is cold, sick, etc., like us, but its rapport with the child's higher qualities now nascent is less, and it never equals the dog in this respect. Boys often become torturers or kill it in a way that seems inexcusable, and thus childish interest may come to a sharply marked conclusion. The acute detection and respon- siveness to every feature, act, and trait, shade of eyes, colors, markings, shape of foot, ear, degree of gentleness, activity, tameness; its most attractive quality of the power to play; its size, which must be adjusted somewhat to that of the child, that it may be easily handled, many animals being too small, others too big for them; its nocturnal habits in sleeping day- times; its power to climb, almost as impressive as that of the dog to swim; the progressive recognition of sex in naming cats; the fact that here, too, there is not one expression of in- terest in feline anatomy, which many school courses make so prominent; the pubescent lapse back at first to earlier interests, as if here again adolescence were not so old or mature as child- hood— in all this we see restored in childhood the psychic stage of taming animals and how important a factor in the education of a child is experience with pets like this. As no carnivora were so well fitted to their wild environment as the cat family, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE so that its feral traits are still almost intact, it appeals most to girls, relatively useless as it is, in part because the old instinct which made her the domesticator of wild animals survives best s&t 8* \ Boys' Interest in cat* -o-o-o-o- Boys' interest In horses in her. It is preeminently the plaything animal, with a place in several score of plays and games, is highly anthropo- morphized and so is an important revealer of childhood. It is sometimes loved in old age chiefly as a memento of childhood, with which often no animal is so closely connected.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 227 Mr. Bucke l has made tentative but suggestive statistical curves showing pubescent changes of zest for some of the com- mon forms of animal life, as illustrated on opposite page.
From the census on which these curves were constructed, it appears that boys' love of and interest in dogs at all ages exceeds that of girls, but rises rapidly from seven to fourteen, where it appears to culminate. Girls' interest follows rather nearly the same curve. Boys' interest in cats is at all ages much inferior to that of girls, and appears to culminate at eleven, while girls' interest does not increase after eight. Boys' interest in the horse rises very rapidly during the early teens. Their interest in rabbits does not appear to increase after the eighth or ninth year, but rather to decline. Girls' interest in canaries shows an early pubescent rise. The popu- larity of dogs for both boys and girls at early puberty is more and more based upon their intelligence. The ascription of moral qualities and love of animals generally undergo some decline at the dawn of puberty, where there is a stage of disillusion and the high childish estimate is corrected by progressive knowledge, but after about fourteen, feeling for common ani- mals and a belief in their intelligence rise again. From eight to nine there is great disillusion of the feeling that animals appreciate care, but the impression that they do so, after being for a time repressed by intelligence, rises instinctively again later. Games of hide and seek, catch ball, etc., also decline rapidly at about eight or nine and thereafter. The appreciation of the utility of the dog in both boys and girls rises rapidly and steadily through the early teens. Disposition to train dogs in- creases very rapidly from ten to fifteen. Of all the animals the dog is the favorite; cats follow; then come birds, rabbits, horses, parrots, chickens, pigeons, squirrels, and many others. Although most of the exploration in this field of youthful in- terest is yet to be done, and the above conclusions are sure to be more or less modified, we can already see that just as man's development would have been very different without animals, and the fishing, hunting, and pastoral stages, so childhood is maimed if long robbed of its due measure of influences from this comprehensive arsenal of educational material. Indeed, 1 Cyno. Psychoses. Fed. Sem., Dec., 1903, vol. x, pp. 459-513.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Age8 U) 12 U 16 I can almost believe that, if pedagogy is ever to become ade- quate to the needs of the soul, the time will come when ani- mals will play a far larger educational role than has yet been conceived, that they will be curriculized, will acquire a new and higher humanistic or culture value in the future comparable with their utility in the past, and that there will be a new poign- ancy of regret over the loss by extermination of many species akin to that now felt at the barbaric iconoclasm that has deprived the world of so many of the priceless monuments of antiquity.
Meanwhile one of the greatest educational needs of the present time is not one but a series of animal books, one each on, e. g., the dog, cat, lion, the monkey, horse, snake, one each on several species of birds, fish, and insects, and a dozen or two more of a kind that does not now exist, giving very little about structure but much about nests, food-getting, migrations, ani- mal families, homes, and colonies, domestication, training, with some standard tales and fables, folk-lore, literature, breeds, myth, and poetry, copiously illustrated, and full of the spirit of the field naturalist, observer, and lover, something of animals famous in history, with some, but not too many, eco- nomic uses and still less technicalities, and guided in each case by some such studies as those above instanced on the dog and cat. To one in rapport with interests of childhood and youth it requires no Phaethon flight of imagination to see in the future a new type of literature here that will rescue the early teaching of zoology from its present degradation, which will utilize for moral and humanistic as well as scientific uses a wealth of natural zest now going to waste. I am glad to know a very few people who could confect such a book, but they are not professors or even high school teachers of biology, for these have singularly lost contact with the nature and needs of childwho train dogs ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 229 hood and youth and regard the spirit of Brehm's Thierleben as obsolete and unscientific.
Finally, in view of all this, there is no other possible con- clusion than that the problem of teaching sciences in the teens is in the main yet to be solved. City life favors knowledge of mankind, physics, and perhaps chemistry, but so removes the child from the heavens and animate nature that it is pathetic to see how unknown and merely bookish knowledge of them becomes to the town-bred child. Biology, that has given us evo- lution, is perhaps farthest from recognizing the necessity of developing a genetic pedagogy that shall very slowly pass over to the adult logical stage which cross-sections it only when it has completed its own. How undeveloped the development theory still is is here seen*in the fact that it has not yet drawn its own obvious but momentous lesson for education where it has its most fruitful field of application. When this science knows life histories as well as it does morphology it will have the material with which to begin aright. We no longer deform the child's body, and have in more and more ways recognized its rights, but we still arrest and even mutilate the soul of adoles- cence by prematurely forcing it into the mental mold of grown-ups. Instead of the ideal of knowing or doing one thing minutely well, like the ant, bee, or wasp, we should construct, even if at certain points it be done tentatively and out of glimpses, apergus, hints, a true universe, and pass from the whole to parts and not vice versa. Love of nature always burgeons in the soul of youth, but its half-grown buds are picked open or stunted, and disenchantment too often leaves the soul only a few mouthfuls of wretched desiccated phrases, as meager and inadequate as those of poetry in a con- ventional age that has drifted far from her. A true pedagogy of science is in large measure yet to be developed. Art, liter- ature, and perhaps above all, religion, need this reconstruction, and I could not be an optimist in education if I did not expect its coming without the shadow of a doubt.
Harnack says, " How often in history theology has only been a means of setting religion aside." It is just as true that science is often taught in a way to destroy the love of the very department of nature it should develop. The only cor- 230 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE