for the waning of the moon to a crescent by saying it was half stuck or half buttoned into the sky. The movements of the sun and other heavenly bodies are similarly apperceived by help of ideas of movements of familiar terrestrial objects. Thus the sun was thought by the Boston children half-mythologically, half-mechanically, to roll, to fly, to be blown (like a soap bubble or balloon?) and so forth. The anthropocentric form of teleological explanation is apt to creep in, as when a Boston child said charmingly that the moon comes round when people forget to light some lamps. Theological ideas, too, are pressed into this sphere of explanation, as in the attribution of the disappearance of the sun to God’s pulling it up higher out of sight, to his taking it into heaven and putting it to bed, and so forth. These ideas are pretty obviously not those of a country child with a horizon. There is rather more of nature-observation in the idea of another child that the sun after setting lies under the trees where angels mind it. The impressive phenomena of thunder and lightning give rise in the case of the child as in that of the Nature-man to some fine myth-making. The American children, as already observed, have different mechanical illustrations for setting forth the _modus_ of the supernatural operation here, thunder being thought of now as God groaning, now as his walking heavily on the floor of heaven (_cf._ the old Norse idea that thunder is caused by the rolling of Thor’s chariot), now as his hammering, now as his having coals run in—ideas which show how naïvely the child-mind humanises the Deity, making him a respectable citizen with a house and a coal-cellar. In like manner the lightning is attributed to God’s burning the gas quick, striking many matches at once, or other familiar human device for getting a brilliant light suddenly. So God turns on rain by a tap, or lets it down from a cistern by a hose, or, better, passes it through a sieve or a dipper with holes.[47] In like manner a high wind was explained by a girl of five and a half by saying that it was God’s birthday, and he had received a trumpet as a present. ----- Footnote 47: See the article on “The Contents of Children’s Minds” already referred to. -----