Throughout the whole region of these mysterious phenomena we have illustrations of the anthropocentric tendency to regard what takes place as designed for us poor mortals. The little girl of whom Mr. Canton writes thought “the wind, and the rain and the moon ‘walking’ came out to see _her_, and the flowers woke up with the same laudable object”.[48] When frightened by the crash of the thunder a child instinctively thinks that it is all done to vex his little soul. One of the funniest examples of the application of this idea I have met with is in the Worcester Collection. Two children, D. and K., aged ten and five respectively, live in a small American town. D., who is reading about an earthquake, addresses his mother thus: “Oh, isn’t it dreadful, mamma? Do you suppose we will ever have one here?” K., intervening with the characteristic impulse of the young child to correct his elders: “Why, no, D., they don’t have earthquakes in little towns like this”. There is much to unravel in this delightful childish observation. It looks to my mind as if the earthquake were envisaged by the little five-year-old as a show, God being presumably the travelling showman, who takes care to display his fearful wonders only where there is an adequate body of spectators. ----- Footnote 48: _The Invisible Playmate_, pp. 27, 28. ----- Finally, the same impulse to understand the new and strange by assimilating it to the familiar is, so far as I can gather, seen in children’s first ideas about those puzzling semblances of visible objects which are due to subjective sensations. As we shall see in C.’s case the bright spectra or after-images caused by looking at the sun are instinctively objectived by the child, that is regarded as things external to his body. Here is a pretty full account of a child’s thought about these subjective optical phenomena. A little boy of five, our little zoologist, in poor health at the time, “constantly imagined he saw angels, and said they were not white, that was a mistake, they were little coloured things, light and beautiful, and they went into the toy-basket and played with his toys”. Here we have not only objectifying but myth-building. A year later he returned to the subject. “He stood at the window at B. looking out at a sea-mist thoughtfully and said suddenly, ‘Mamma, do you remember I told you that I had seen angels? Well, I want now to say they were not angels, though I thought they were. I have seen it often lately, I see it now: it is bright stars, small bright stars moving by. I see it in the mist before that tree. I see it oftenest in the misty days.... Perhaps by-and-by I shall think it is something in my own eyes.’” Here we see a long and painstaking attempt of a child’s brain to read a meaning into the ‘flying spots,’ which many of us know though we hardly give them a moment’s attention.