Closely connected with all this is the disposition to make collections. The disposition to appropriate and cling to whatever attracts the attention (James[216] makes it a special instinct, which he calls appropriation or acquisitiveness) is a feature of constructive activity. Animals as well as children try to accumulate whatever pleases them. Viscachas, woodrats, various members of the crow family, and many other birds, have the habit of hoarding especially bright objects. The inclination first shows itself in children in their collecting in one place various things of only ordinary interest, as in the pockets of a small boy,[217] or a girl’s bureau drawers; and adults too often retain this habit. G. Keller, whose _metier_ for the grotesque is well known,[218] gives exaggerated instances of the mania for collecting, as in the case of the lacquered cabinet belonging to Züs Bünzlin, one of his heroines. It contained a gilded and painted Easter egg, a half dozen silver teaspoons, the Lord’s Prayer printed in gold on a red transparent substance which she said was human skin, a cherry stone on which a crucifix was carved, a broken ivory box lined with red silk and containing a small mirror and a thimble, another cherry stone inside of which a miniature game of skittles was going on, a nut with a Madonna in it under glass and a silver heart inside, and so on. But the passion for collecting reaches its height only when some particular kind of thing forms its object. It is natural to us all to get together as many things as we can of a kind which especially attracts us. When the four-year-old girl who never tires of picking flowers ties those she had plucked into a bouquet to carry home, we have the beginning of discriminating collection; when she searches for and hoards shells or coloured pebbles of unusually perfect shape, she is really within the charmed circle. Munkacsy tells us of his childhood: “Strange as it may seem, my chief enjoyment was in gathering stones on the street, and many a box on the ear has the habit earned for me. I stuffed my pockets so full that the integrity of my trousers was seriously threatened; and besides, my father had frequently forbidden it.”[219] Boys will collect anything, says James, which they see other boys collect, “from pieces of chalk and peach pits up to books and photographs.”[220] Of the hundred students whom he questioned, only four or five had never collected anything. The words “which they see other boys collect” intimate that imitation and rivalry have much to do with this impulse. Any boy is admired and envied who has very rare butterflies, beetles, eggs, stamps, etc., or a large number of them; as indeed is any man, for the same principle applies to adults. There are other manifestations, too, of the combative emulative spirit which is active in almost all play. The search for more specimens often leads to contests which place even those who are otherwise honourable in an attitude of open hostility,