What, it may be asked, is the explanation of this quaint childish thought? I think it probable that it is suggested in different ways. One must remember that as a child grows taller grown-ups may seem _by comparison_ to get shorter. Again old people are wont to stoop and so to look shorter; and then children often hear in their stories of "little old" people. I suspect, however, that in some cases there is a more subtle train of thought. As the belief of the two brothers in people's coming back from heaven suggests, the idea of shrinkage is connected with those of birth and death. May it not be that the more thoughtful sort of child reasons in this way? Babies which are sent from heaven must have been something there; and people when they die must continue to be something in heaven. Why, then, the "dead" people that go to this place are the very same as the babies that come from it. To make this theory "square" with other knowledge, the idea of shrinkage, either before or after death, has to be called in. That it takes place before death is supported by what was said above, and probably also by the information often given to children that people when they die are carried by angels to heaven just as the babies are said to be brought down to earth by the angels. The origin of babies and young animals furnishes the small brain, as we have seen, with much food for speculation. Here the little thinker is not often left to excogitate a theory for himself. His inconvenient questionings in this direction have to be firmly checked, and thus arise the well-known legends about the doctor, the angel and so forth. With the various lore thus collected, supplemented by the pretty conceits of Hans Andersen and other writers of fairy stories, the young inquirer has to do his best. How the child-thinker is apt to go to work here is illustrated in a collection of the thoughts of American school-children. Some of these said that God drops babies for the women and doctors to catch them, others that he brings them down to earth by means of a wooden ladder, others again, that mamma, nurse, or doctor goes up and fetches them in a balloon. They are said by other children to grow in cabbages, or to be placed by God in water, perhaps in the sewer, where they are found by the doctor, who takes them to sick folks that want them. Here we have delicious touches of childish fancy, quaint adaptations of fairy and Bible lore, as in the use of Jacob's ladder and the legend of Moses placed among the bulrushes, this last being enriched by the thorough master-stroke of child-genius, the idea of the dark, mysterious, wonder-producing sewer.