Here, again, the small investigator finds much hard work to be got through, for nature's doings are apt to be varied and rather complex. A child, for example, finds that when he dips his hand into sand, clay, or what not, he makes a hole. But when he puts it into water no hole is left behind. Hence we can understand one little fellow asking his father, "How _is_ it that when we put our hand into the water we don't make a hole in it?" Here we have not mere curiosity; we have perplexity at what looks contradictory to the usual run of things. The same thing is illustrated in the question of another little boy, "Can they (the fish) breathe with their moufs under water?" Among the things which are apt to puzzle the young inquirer is the disappearance of things. He can as little understand this as the beginning of things, and so he will ask: "Where does the sea swim to?" or "Where does the wind go to?" or "Where does the wet (_e.g._, on the pavement after rain) go to?" As the view of things begins to widen and embrace the absent and the past new puzzles occur and prompt to a more philosophical kind of questioning. Sometimes it is the mere vastness of the world, the multitude of things, which oppresses and confuses the young understanding. "Mother," asked a small boy of four, "why _is_ there such a lot of things in the world if no one knows all these things?" A little girl about three and a half years old asked her mother, "Mamma, why do there be any more days, why do there? and why don't we leave off eating and drinking?" It is hard for us older folk to get behind questions like this so as to understand the source of the childish bewilderment. The subject of origins is, as we all know, apt to be a sore puzzle for the childish mind. The beginnings of living things are, of course, the great mystery. "There's such a lot of things," remarked the little zoologist I have recently been quoting, "I want to know, that you say nobody knows, mamma. I want to know who made God, and I want to know if pussy has eggs to help her make ickle (little) kitties." Finding that this was not so, he observed: "Oh, then, I s'pose she has to have God to help her if she doesn't have kitties in eggs given her to sit on". Another little boy, five years old, found his way to the puzzle of the reciprocal genetic relation of the hen and the egg, and asked his mother: "When there _is_ no egg where does the hen come from? When there _was_ no egg, I mean, where _did_ the hen come from?" Another little fellow was puzzled to know how the first child was suckled, or, as a little girl of four and a half years put it: "When everybody was a baby--then who could be their nurse--if they were all babies?" In this bold sweep of inquiry a child is apt to go back to the absolute beginnings of things, as when he asks, "Who made God?" or, "What was there before God?" The idea that God has _always_ been seems to be particularly perplexing and even oppressive to a child's mind.