A CHILD’S METAPHORS.—The early use of names by children seems to illustrate the play of fancy almost as much as the activity of thought. In sooth, have not thought and imagination this in common, that they both combine elements of experience in new ways, and both trace out the similarities of things? The poet’s simile is not so far removed from the scientific discoverer’s new idea. Goethe the poet readily became Goethe the morphologist, detecting analogies in structures which to the common eye were utterly unlike. The sweet attractiveness of baby-speech is due in no small measure to its highly pictorial and metaphorical character. Like the primitive language of the race, that of the child is continually used as a vehicle for poetical comparison. The child and the poet have this in common, that their minds are not fettered by all the associations and habits of mind which lead us prosaic persons to separate things by absolutely insuperable barriers. In their case imagination darts swiftly, like a dragon-fly, from object to object, ever discovering beneath a surface-dissimilarity some unobtrusive likeness. A child is apt to puzzle its elders by these swift movements of its mind. It requires a certain poetic element in a parent to follow the lead of the daring child-fancy, and it is probable that many a fine perception of analogy by children has been quite thrown away on the dull and prejudiced minds of their seniors. To give an example of this metaphorical use of words by the child: C. when eighteen months old was one day watching his sister as she dipped her crust into her tea. He was evidently surprised by the rare sight, and after looking a moment or two, exclaimed “Ba!” (bath), laughing with delight, and trying, as was his wont when deeply interested in a spectacle, to push his mother’s face round so that she too might admire it. The boy delighted in such figurative use of words, now employing them as genuine similes, as when he said of a dog panting after a run, “Dat bow-wow like puff-puff” and of the first real ship he saw sailing, “Dat ship go majory daw” (_i.e._ like marjory-daw in the nursery rhyme). Like many a poet he has had his recurring or standing metaphors. Thus, as we have seen, “ship” was the figurative expression for all objects having a pyramidal form. A pretty example of his love of metaphor was his habit of calling the needle in a small compass of his father’s “bir” (bird). It needs a baby-mind to detect the faint resemblance to the bird form and the bird movement here. The same tendency of the child-mind to view things metaphorically or by the aid of analogies to what is already familiar, shows itself in the habit of personifying natural objects. It has been said by a living philosopher that children do not attribute life, thought, and purpose to inanimate things; but observation of their use of words is, I think, decidedly against this view. C. had a way from a very early date of