Such questions easily appear foolish because, as in the case just quoted, they are directed by quaint childish fancies. The child’s anthropomorphic way of looking out on the world leads him to assimilate animal to human ways. One feature in this fact-gleaning kind of question is the great store which the child sets by the name of a thing. M. Compayré has pointed out that the form of question: ‘What is this?’ often means, “What is it called?” The child’s unformulated theory seems to be that everything has its own individual name. The little boy just spoken of explained to his mother that he thought all the frogs, the mice, the birds, and the butterflies had names given to them by their mothers as he himself had. Perhaps this was only a way of expressing the childish idea that everything has its name, primordial and unchangeable. A second direction of this early questioning is towards the reason and the cause of things. The typical form is here ‘why?’ This form of inquiry occurred in the case of Preyer’s boy at the age of two years forty-three weeks. But it becomes the all-predominant form of question somewhat later. Who that has tried to instruct the small child of three or four does not know the long shrill whinelike sound of this question? This form of question develops naturally out of the earlier, for to give the ‘what?’ of a thing, that is its connexions, is to give its ‘why?’ that is its mode of production, its use and purpose. Nothing perhaps in child utterance is better worth interpreting, hardly anything more difficult to interpret, than this simple-looking little ‘why?’ We ourselves perhaps do not use the word ‘why’ and its correlative ‘because’ with one clear meaning; and the child’s first use of the words is largely imitative. What may be pretty safely asserted is that even in the most parrot-like and wearisome iteration of ‘why?’ and its equivalents ‘what for?’ etc., the child shows a dim recognition of the truth that a thing is understandable, that it has its reasons if only they can be found.