The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought: Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-DayChamberlain, Alexander Francis
Science
The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought: Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-Day
Chamberlain, Alexander Francis
Child rearing; Children -- Folklore; Folklore and children
The comparisons sometimes made of children with various of the lower
animals, such as monkeys, bears, pigs, etc., come more naturally to some
primitive peoples, who, as Ploss has pointed out, suckle at the breast
the young of certain animals simultaneously with their own offspring. In
this way, the infant in the Society Islands comes early into association
with puppies, as he does also among several of the native tribes of
Australia and America; so was it likewise in ancient Rome, and the
custom may yet be found among the tent-gypsies of Transylvania, in
Persia, and even within the present century has been met with in Naples
and Göttingen. The Maori mother, in like manner, suckles young pigs, the
Arawak Indian of Guiana young monkeys (as also do the Siamese), the
natives of Kamtschatka young bears. An old legend of the city of Breslau
has it that the fashion certain ladies have of carrying dogs around with
them originated in the fact that Duke Boleslau, in the last quarter of
the eleventh century, punished the women of Breslau, for some connubial
unfaithfulness, by taking away their suckling children and making them,
carry instead puppies at the breast (392. I. 61).
Of the Arekuna of Guiana, Schomburgk tells us:--"They bring up children
and monkeys together. The monkeys are members of the family, eat with
the other members, are suckled by the women, and have great affection
for their human nurses. Oftentimes a woman is to be seen with a child
and a monkey at the breast, the two nurselings quarrelling" (529. 13).
The young children of the less nomadic tribes grow up in close
association with the few domestic animals possessed by their parents,
tumbling about with the puppies on the wigwam-floor or racing with them
around the camp-stead.
The history of totemism and fetichism, primitive medicine, and the arts
connected therewith, their panaceas, talismans, and amulets, show early
association of the child with animals. In the village of Issapoo, on the
island of Fernando Po, in Western Africa, there is fastened to a pole in
the market-place a snake-skin, to touch which all infants born the
preceding year are brought by their mothers during an annual festival
(529. 32). In various parts of the world, novices and neophytes are put
to dream or fast in seclusion until they see some animal which becomes
their tutelary genius, and whose form is often tattooed upon their body.
Sir John Maundeville, the veracious mediaeval chronicler, reported that
in Sicily serpents were used to test the legitimacy of children; "if the
children be illegitimate, the serpents bite and kill them." Hartland
cites, on the authority of Thiele, "a story in which a wild stallion
colt is brought in to smell two babes, one of which is a changeling.
Every time he smells one he is quiet and licks it; but, on smelling the
other, he is invariably restive and strives to kick it. The latter,
therefore, is the changeling" (258. 111).
_Animal Nurses._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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