Among the simpler illustrations of the effort man makes to assimilate the external system to himself are those with which we are more or less familiar in the domain of language. We find them first in the forms for gender by which, in all inflectional tongues, inanimate objects are to this extent likened to living animals. A similar tendency is at work in the widespread lingual habit of naming things after parts of the body, as in the case of "door," called the "eye of the house" by the native of Banks' Island; of "son-tree," the term applied by the Siamese to "fruit"; of the Malay's use of the noun "child" for "lock"; of "house-belly," the African Mandingo's equivalent for "in the house"; and of "hair," often used for "leaf" or "feather" in many Melanesian languages.[A] In more modern forms of speech the process is suggested by such expressions as the _head_ of a bridge, the _eye_ of a needle, the _mouth_ of a river, the _neck_ of an estuary, the _trunk_ and _arms_ of a tree, the _lungs_ of a bellows, the _bones_ of an umbrella, the _nose_ of a promontory, the _ears_ of a book, the _fingers_ of a clock, the _legs_ of a table, the _veins_ of marble, the _foot_ of a mountain. Then there are analogies based on the activities of the human body, for when we describe things as standing, sitting, or lying; as rising, falling, running, or climbing--when we use expressions like "striking clock," "dancing light," "sleeping lake," "yawning precipice," "laughing skies," "babbling brooks," "raging billows," we are applying to the objects named terms originally used to describe our own acts. The sense of hearing, again, is utilized in such expressions as _taube Nuss_ ("with nothing in the shell") and _taube Kohlen_ ("those which have burned out"). So the defect of blindness is objectified in the _cæcum vallum_ of Roman speech, in _ciego_, said in Spanish of cheese that "has no eyes," and in the _blinder Schuss_ of the Germans, whose more familiar _Augenblick_ everybody recalls. Not less suggestive are the numerous expressions which project conceptions of life and death into the environment, such as the _caput mortuum_ (_tête morte_) of chemistry, _eau vive_ (_Quellwasser_), "dead water" (turn of the tide), _todte Farbe_ and _lebhafte Farbe_, _vivus lapis_ (firestone), "quicksand" and "quicksilver," the "dead of night," "dead weight," a "dead level," and _todtes Kapital_. Nor must we forget that the reading of vitality into inorganic objects, common enough among savages, has by no means disappeared from civilized races. Dr. Stanley Hall's inquiries have shown that out of forty-eight children just attaining school age, twenty believed the moon and stars to be alive, fifteen thought a doll and sixteen thought flowers would suffer pain if burned. One pupil described the crescent moon as "half stuck" or "half buttoned" into the sky; the spluttering of coals in a fire was called "barking" by a girl four years and a half old. Miss Ingelow says that when over two