There exist also many social clubs and societies, more or less under the supervision of the older members of the community, in which phases of human life other than the purely religious or benevolent find opportunity to display themselves; and between these and the somewhat sterner church-societies a connecting link is formed by the "Friday Night Clubs" of the Unitarian Church and the "Young People's Associations" of other liberal denominations. In the home itself, this society instinct is recognized, and the list of children's teas, dinners, parties, "receptions," "doll-parties," "doll-shows," etc., would be a long one. Among all peoples, barbarous as well as civilized, since man is by nature a social animal, the instinct for society develops early in the young, and the sociology of child-hood offers a most inviting field for research and investigation both in the Old World and in the New. CHAPTER XV. THE CHILD AS LINGUIST. But what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light, And with no language but a cry.--Tennyson. Yet she carried a doll as she toddled alone, And she talked to that doll in a tongue her own.--Joaquin Miller. Among savages, children are, to a great extent, the originators of idiomatic diversities.--Charles Rau. It was as impossible for the first child endowed with this faculty not to speak in the presence of a companion similarly endowed, as it would be for a nightingale or a thrush not to carol to its mate. The same faculty creates the same necessity in our days, and its exercise by young children, when accidentally isolated from the teachings and influence of grown companions, will readily account for the existence of all the diversities of speech on our globe.--Horatio Hale. Some scientists have held that mankind began with the _Homo Alalus_, speechless, dumb man, an hypothesis now looked npon by the best authorities as untenable; and the folk have imagined that, were not certain procedures gone through with upon the new-born child, it would remain dumb through life, and, if it were allowed to do certain things, a like result would follow. Ploss informs us that the child, and the mother, while she is still suckling it, must not, in Bohemia, eat fish, else, since fish are mute, the child would be so also; in Servia, the child is not permitted to eat any fowl that has not already crowed, or it would remain dumb for a very long time; in Germany two little children, not yet able to speak, must not kiss each other, or both will be dumb. _The Frenum._ Our English phrase, "an unbridled tongue," has an interesting history and _entourage_ of folk-lore. The subject has been quite recently discussed by Dr. Chervin, of the Institute for Stammerers at Paris (205). Citing the lines of Boileau:-- "Tout charme en un enfant dont la langue sans fard, A peine du filet encore debarrassee Sait d'un air innocent begayer sa pensee,"