I have referred in the last chapter to children's way of thinking of things as made by somebody. The idea of hand-work is extended in odd ways. For example, quite young children are apt to extend the ideas broken and mended to all kinds of objects. Anything which seems to have become reduced by losing a portion of itself is said to be "broken". Thus a little boy of three, on seeing the moon partly covered by a cloud, remarked: "The moon is broken". On the other hand, in the case of one little boy, everything not broken or intact was said to be "mended". Do children when they talk in this fashion really think that things are constantly undergoing repairs at the hand of some mysterious mechanic, or are they using their familiar terms figuratively in default of others? It is hard to say. Curious thoughts about Nature's processes arise later when the inquirer tries to make them intelligible to himself. Here the first mechanical conceptions of the wind deserve attention. An American child, asked what a tree was, answered oddly, "To make the wind blow". A pupil of mine distinctly recalls that when a child he accounted for the wind at night by the swaying of two large elms which stood in front of the house not far from the windows of his bedroom. This putting of the cart before the horse is funny enough, yet it is perfectly natural. All the wind-making a child can observe, as in blowing with his mouth, waving a newspaper, and so forth, is effected by the movement of a material object. _The Bigger World._ With respect to distant objects, a child is of course freer to speculate, and, as we know, his ideas of the heavenly bodies are wont to be odd enough. His thoughts about these remote objects are rendered quainter by his inability to conceive of great distances. Children naturally enough take this world to be what it looks to their uninstructed eyes. Thus the earth becomes a circular plain, and the sky a sort of inverted bowl placed upon it. Many children appear like the ancients to suppose that the sky and the heavenly bodies touch the earth somewhere, and could be reached by taking a long, long journey. Other and similar ideas are formed by some. Thus one little girl used on looking at the sky to fancy she was inside a blue balloon. The heavenly bodies are apt to be taken for flat discs. The brother of the little girl just referred to took the sun to be a big kind of cask cover, which could be put on the round globe to make a "see-saw".