STORIES SELECTED BECAUSE OF THEIR STIMULUS TO A CHILD’S MEMORY
THE LITTLE PINE TREE THAT WISHED FOR NEW LEAVES _In For the Children’s Hour_ THE STORY OF THE MORNING GLORY SEED _Emilie Poulsson, in In the Child’s World_ THE SEED BABIES’ BLANKET _Mary Gaylord, in For the Children’s Hour_ ABOUT ANGELS _Laura Richards, in The Golden Windows_ THE CRY FAIRY _Alice Brown, in The One-Footed Fairy_ THE DISAPPOINTED BUSH _Thornton Burgess, in Mother West Wind’s Children_ HOW THE CAMEL GOT HIS HUMP _Rudyard Kipling, in Just So Stories_
A newly hatched chicken begins its daily work of living and providing for itself by scratching the earth in a phenomenally short space of time after it has chipped its shell. A baby notices a kitten and stretches out its hands to grasp in them a colored flower at almost the same period of its development as when it smiles at its mother. The chicken and the baby are alike in being creatures of _instinct_. The chicken scratches because its mother scratched for a living in the days of her chicken-hood and so did her mother and as many other hens and chickens as many previous years as one can count. The baby feels himself akin with the cat and loves the flower because his ancestors lived in close comradeship with animals and nature. From these and from an analysis of many other phases of instinct we may come at a working definition of the phenomenon.
_Instinct may be defined as inherited memory._
It may be said that a child starts out on his life journey with a certain amount of brain capital which is his gift at birth. He has no knowledge of the outside world at birth. Color, sound, heat, cold and like concepts are unknown to him and he must make them his through the medium of his senses. The will to use his senses in the acquiring of useful information constitutes his brain capital, however. Instinctively he claims brotherhood with the animal world, and instinctively also he claims kinship with trees and flowers and winter and summer and birds and the gleaming earth. Pebbles and shells and sand and seeds interest him with a compellingness beyond our understanding until we remember that a child is the epitome of all the ages of the race which have combined to make us and our civilization. The age when man bartered with pebbles, decorated his person with shells, lived in a cave and found his food in seeds and berries is exemplified in the little chap at play on the beach with these same nature materials.