Studies of childhood / by James Sully.

  • Sully, James, 1842-1923.
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies of childhood / by James Sully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    i. INTRODUCTORY. Man has always had the child with him, and one might be sure that since he became gentle and alive to the beauty of things he must have come under the spell of the baby. We have evidence beyond the oft-quoted departure of Hector and other pictures of childish grace in early literature that baby-worship and baby-subjection are not wholly things of modern times. There is a pretty story taken down by Mr. Leland from the lips of an old Indian woman, which relates how Glooskap the hero-god, after conquering all his enemies, rashly tried his hand at managing a certain mighty baby, Wasis by name, and how he got punished for his rashness.1 Yet there is good reason to suppose that it is only within comparatively recent times that the more subtle charm and the deeper significance of infancy have been discerned. We have come to appreciate babyhood as we have come to appreciate the finer lineaments of nature as a whole. This applies, of course, more especially to the ruder sex. The man has in him much of the boy’s con¬ tempt for small things, and he needed ages of education at the hands of the better-informed woman before he could perceive the charm of infantile ways. One of the first males to do justice to this attractive subject was Rousseau. He made short work of the theological dogma that the child is born morally depraved,