The pedagogic lessons of this are plain and unequivocal. A botany that begins by merely plucking, collecting, analyzing, classify- ing, affixing Latin names that mean nothing in place of those that mean everything, desiccating in herbaria, makes havoc with all this, and if economic and edible plants are preferred, the soul is starved. A technical term is at first a weed, which is defined as a plant out of place. Taxonomy has its important function, but here it is not even a necessary evil. The fact that so many young and old maidens wear out a Gray's Botany or other text-book, and learn to give uncouth names to all wayside plants, is a pathetic illustration of woman's subserviency to authority or to man-made fashion in making something of a stone when her soul cried out for bread. I have collected twenty-one poems on the daisy, more than half of them written by women, and not one taught a new fact or term, but all talk directly to the heart. If Latin were accepted as the inexorable mind-breaking condition, and the whole circa 150,000 plant species known, it would not be botany but a rank crop of Latin tares, and would put the child's soul, which is normally nearer the floral kingdom than the adult's, farther away, while what lore survived would be like flowers springing from a grave till " nothing can bring back the hour of splendor of the grass or glory in the flower." It is like the study of the grammar and diction- ary by themselves. We must recognize the natural, youthful senti- ments as the persistence of what was once and long man's highest philosophy. Rightly taught, no science equals botany in educational influence and benefit, and wrongly taught nothing so dries up the spontaneous springs of interest.
I can not detail here but only briefly indicate the method of na- ture. After the folk-lore stage, scientific study at the high school should begin with fertilization, first revealed by Sprengel and Dar- win, with the relations of blossoms to insect life, and thus the whole philosophy of sex taught in the delicate far-off way of the field. Then should come the relations of plants to men, the vine, sugar, cotton, flax, fruit, and cereals, with something of their domestication. A third human factor, never to be lost sight of, should be the biographic element in the history of botany, from the Herbalists and doctrine of ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 21 1 signatures on to Linnaeus and down to the present time. Something of mythic plants, also of pests, diseases, struggle for existence, and com- mercial and industrial botany, should also be taught. Drawing should be greatly reduced; much taught without the presence of specimens, and laboratory work minimized, save a few experiments on move- ments, tropisms and plant physiology. The text-books of Hodge, Bes- sey, Grant Allen, Macdougal, Bailey, and the Cornell leaflets, and especially Hugh Macmillan, are all helpful.1 XL Children's feeling for trees is another of the indis- putable and well-marked psychogenetic phenomena, which have hitherto remained utterly inexplicable. Our returns show that children instinctively and without teaching ascribe emotion, sense, intelligence, morality to trees. They have arms and legs; sap is their blood or tears; leaves are their dress, which they feel ashamed to lose; their bark is skin; they are per- sonified; fall in love with* each other; are lonesome if trees near them are felled; make shade, if they are kind, just for the chil- dren; like to have them around; spread out their arms in bene- diction or shelter; watch over the house; miss the children and perhaps weep for lonesomeness if they do not play round them; are fast friends of the birds, who perhaps sing to put the leaves to sleep, and are welcomed back in the spring; trees feel hon- ored and joyous if birds build their nests in them; hold out their hands when they are passing to invite them to alight. Trees talk to each other and understand the thoughts and lan- guage, at least of the trees of the same species, though oftener of all kinds. They sometimes laugh loudly; sway their branches as if to shake hands; say good-night. The rustling of their leaves is whispering of or to the fairies, who live in them; " the wind blowing through branches is leaves singing 1 The latter (The Deeper Teachings of Plant Life; New York, 1902) would restore this deep ancestral interest to its rightful place in the soul. He even says that in flowers we see human nature reflected in a way we had lost sight of. In the cotyledons for the nourishment of the young embryo, we have the analogue of the mother's breast. We see nature adorning her bridal bower in the spring; our own selfishness in the spreading of the flat leaves of the daisy round its roots close to the earth that no other may grow beside it. In the dried spathe of the daffodil is the lesson of death, while its blossom, the first in spring, means mortality. The cowslip, a belated primrose, each cup the home of an elf, is the key flower unlock- ing the kingdom of heaven in the spring, through the gates of which the flowers issue; and the bluebell, the last in the fall, is a curfew rung by the trembling hand of an old man to bring us home, etc.
212 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE their babies to sleep; trees of the same kind like to be planted near each other, for if an elm is planted near a maple, it would be like putting an American girl with a little Dutch girl;" but trees can understand the children, and the children the trees. A child of six, walking in the woods, looked up and said, " Oh! I am only going, a little way," because the leaves asked her. To one of ten, if the wind blew mournfully, the leaves said, " I am sad; " if it blew hard, " I am mad." To a boy of ten, trees get angry at the wind and scream, scold, and slap it. To one of eleven years, God comes into the trees at times when the clouds touch their tops. The spirit of trees goes to heaven. They sing to moon and stars. Trees are very often hugged, greeted after a long absence, thanked for giving shade. Trees that cast no shadow are selfish; crooked trees, those that bear no fruit, or are bitter, poisonous, prickly, malodorous, are bad. Children are pained and sometimes exasperated at the cruelty of trimming trees. Dense forests soothe, hush, and awe the soul and feel " like church."
I maintain that the experience of the child and its personal relations can not explain these phenomena and that we must here again have recourse to the phyletic history of the soul. Perhaps no cult has been so wide-spread and persistent as that of sacred trees, and few throw such light on the dark ways of primitive and childish thought. Nearly every early race has its sacred trees or groves; often altars are set up beneath them and sacrifices are made; burials are among their roots or in their branches; libations are poured upon them so that often they grow to great size, because especially nourished. Trees are planted above graves, and the soul of the dead man or the matter of the corpse have some kind of reincarnation in the life of the tree. They are planted at birth and there is a close rapport between the life or fortunes of the tree and that of the man. Their juice is often interpreted as blood; prayers are said to them, if they are to be cut; gifts are hung on them; their voice is often heard. Some think that the first man grew from trees. The Druids worshiped all trees, but thought the mistletoe especially sacred. Spirits perch or live in their branches; God may be incarnate in trees or make a theophany in some burning bush. Trees are anointed, clothed, fumigated; have curative properties; are Dodona oracles; have temples ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 213 built in their honor; are sacred to deities — the oak to Jove, laurel to Apollo, fig to Buddha. The evergreens teach immor- tality, or the fruit of others gives it. The glorified totemic world-trees — Yggdrasil, the Mohammedan Tooba, the Persian Haoma, are of immense proportions; their roots hold the earth together, are watered by mystic rivers; their branches bear the stars as fruit, souls come down them at birth, and to climb them is the way to heaven. God is sometimes tree-shaped, and tree was the Acadian idiograph of God. This cult survives in the Christmas-tree and May-day festivals. The fruit of the tree of knowledge gives wisdom and inspiration, as that of life does immortality.1 If all this established body of data must be invoked and conceded to have a more or less prima facie explanatory power for the phenomena of cm'lclhood, I think we must boldly take the further momentous step of postulating that both the child- ish and the ethnic phenomena, however related, need ulterior 1 The universe-tree has been often regarded as the axle-tree of the earth. It yields the gods their soma. It is so high that it casts a shadow on the moon. Of it the great stick that churns the ocean is made. Yggdrasil is the tree of life and the judgment-seat of the gods. A mythological sucker which sometimes has be- come a substitute of it is the bean-stalk legend, of a ladder reaching from heaven to earth. Sometimes these mystic trees appear suddenly and unexpectedly. The barber's pole was originally a human sacrifice post grasped by the victim, and later colored with red paint instead of blood; this, the May-pole, and the mystic reed, are all irradiations of the world-tree in whose branches Osiris's body is suspended be- tween heaven and earth. Sacred groves, trees, and even shrubs, have been set apart like the rowan tree, the ganus thorn, the mistletoe. O'Neill (Night of the Gods, vol. i, p. 329) thinks the all-embracing idea of the universe-tree is illus- trated in the two hundred or more chemicals made from coal tar, all extracted from the earth in past time by trees, and ranging from Berkeley's tar water to the anilin dyes, from the strong acids to saccharine, the sweetest thing known. Christmastrees, the myths of Daphne, the Druid religions, the Golden Bough, all belong here, as do the Kabeiroi, the Dioscures, Corybantes, Curetes, Dactyles, Tel- chines, and the Arvalian trees.
Tree worship must have been polygenous. It prevailed in Assyria, Greece, Po- land, France, Persia, and is now found in Sahara and Central Africa. Tacitus described sacred groves in Germany. On the Guinea coast nearly every village has its sacred grove. Tree worshipers are abundant among Filipinos. They are often hung with ornaments and offerings. In Mexico useful trees and even maize are worshiped. The Lapps have sacred trees, sometimes regarded as gods themselves, sometimes as ladders. — (The Origin of Civilization, by Sir John Lub- bock; London, 1870, p. 191 et sfg.)
Trees have strongly marked individual, and perhaps still more accentuated 214 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE explanation, and suggest that we must here invoke the hy- pothesis of arboreal life in man's remote progenitors.1 The argument may be summarized as follows: The earth was formerly more covered with forests than at pres- ent, and life for higher anthropoids nearest man in bodily structure was for an unknown but no doubt very prolonged period arboreal. This stage was, at any rate, protracted enough to modify the body profoundly to fit the requirements of tree life. The early primates and primitive man were frugiferous. Tree life lifted the fore-quarters of quadrupedal life into the erect position; differentiated the fore and hind legs, and especially the fore and hind feet; elevated the head and balanced it upon the spinal column; opened the hip-joint; brought the shoulder-blades back into nearly the same plane instead of their former parallel position; gave the hand and arm its power of inner rotation instead of the palm facing backward; created the human hand, in the powers of which Huxley says man is as much differen- tiated from the higher apes as he is in intellect; greatly increased the range of motion in the arm and brought handwork under the control of the mind and into the focus of the eye in what I have elsewhere called its primary position; 2 developed the palmaris muscle; gave direction to the hairs on the body, still seen in the human embryo; lengthened the foot, still seen in the negro; creased its sole, as still appears in infants; shaped and gave power to the great toe in ways it still shows; developed the remarkable clinging power of the fore- arm, also shown in Robinson's study of human infants a few days old, which at three weeks of age can cling and grasp as adults can not.3 In all these respects savage people show closer correlation with simian structure than civilized races. The female pelvis; the small and large toes; the scapula index; the humeral torsion; the spinal specific characters. The apple-tree is kindly and sheltering; the willow, lithe and graceful for mourning; the oak, strong and heroic; the cedar, sacred; the elm, the hickory, chestnut, birch, beech, aspen, spruce, magnolia, hemlock, locust, linden, mahogany, sycamore, fir, rosewood, almond, banyan, ebony, holly, bamboo, catalpa, yew, are all types and symbols of thought or illustrations of character about which myth, fancy, childish sentiment, and adult reminiscences have spun a mani- fold texture of association. Even the despised garden vegetables (potato, cab- bage, bean, onion, pea, radish, corn, beets, turnip, carrot, pumpkin, squash, yam, rhubarb, watermelon, pepper, citron, orange, peanut, etc.) have often psychic quali- ties and are used as metaphors or descriptions of human traits and qualities.
1 Dr. Quantz, who worked under my direction and with data which I had col- lected to this end, has written a significant article to which the reader is referred. Dendro-Psychoses. Am. Jour, of Psy., July, 1898, vol. ix, pp. 449-506. Also Philpot: The Sacred Tree. London, 1897. Mannhardt: Baumkultus, 2 vols., 2 Notes on the Study of Infants. Ped. Sem., June, 1891, vol. i, p. 130.
3 See The Nineteenth Century, November, 1891. Darwinism in the Nursery.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 215 curvature; relative length of arms; the absence of calves of the legs, which were developed after walking on the earth was an established habit; the form of the nose; the size of the brain; most of the cerebral indices; the early closing of the sutures; the development and opposi- tion of the thumb — in all these respects, as we go down the scale of civilization, we approximate the arboreal form of life.
Passing from the body to the soul is like passing from hard parts, which paleontology conserves, to the soft parts, which shape them but are not preserved, so that difficulties are great and we must be content with less conclusive evidence. No one familiar with the facts now doubts that man has inherited nearly every organ and tissue in his body from lower forms of life, and that there are many rudimen- tary organs (Wiedersheim thinks over a hundred) of no use in the human stage — mere pensioners, relics, like silent letters in spelling, but I think we do not dishonor the soul by making it no less freighted with mementoes of earlier stages of development than the body. We must summarily break from the arbitrary, vicious, and persistent in- fluence of Descartes's automaton theory, and revert to a broader and more Aristotelian conception of the soul, which conceives it as more nearly coincident with life and the evolutionary push upward. Function is as important, persistent, and as specifically characteristic as structure. It is more variable, and perhaps, when established, is no less stable. Instincts are as plastic to the environment, and in man, since evolution focused on the brain, still more so. The psychic vestiges in man, which are suggestive of former arboreal life, are the following: 1. As I have elsewhere shown,1 the fear perhaps strongest and most widely diffused in man is that of thunder and lightning, a fear out of all proportion to the danger, as shown by statistics of those struck by lightning, and with nothing in man's present condition to account for its instinctive strength. But in tropical regions tree life is particularly exposed to lightning, for a tree is a better conductor than air, and its tips attract. If then we assume many generations of life in trees, and that this danger has left its mark and can be transmit- ted, the intensity and diffusion of this fear and awe is to some extent explained.
2. Next in the catalogue of fears comes that of reptiles, and es- pecially serpents. No creatures are objects of such instinctive horror to apes as snakes, as the literature well shows. Now, tree-dwellers have ready immunity or escape from most animals that prey upon them except serpents, still the chief enemies of monkeys, which can follow them into the trees and prey upon their young. Although their progressive movements are slow, their strike or dash is sudden, and they lie in wait in tree-tops. Hence even in Ireland, where for gen- erations there have been no snakes, this fear is strong, and again out 1 A Study of Fears. Am. Jour, of Psy., January, 1897, vol. viii, p. 201.
2i6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE of all proportion to danger in modern life. To be sure, serpents are dangerous on the ground, and in some lands their venom destroys hundreds of lives yearly, so that we must be cautious in ascribing too much weight to the inference here.
3. Another prevalent fear is of high winds, even in districts where they are rare. Against these, cave-dwellers would be more or less protected, and to tornadoes which destroyed trees, wood-dwellers would be especially exposed. Yet life in trees would be still more sus- ceptible to air currents and to storms of all kinds. The depth of the impression weather has made is still seen in its constant recurrence as a topic of conversation, even now when we are so protected by clothing and houses. But life in trees would be most of all exposed, and would thus intensify the fear with the danger.
4. Closely connected with this is the habit of inducing sleep in in- fants by rocking. Sleep is reversionary. Rhythm stamps the organ- ism. Sailors on landing must* readjust their gait; soldiers keep on walking in sleep; children and idiots sway, and we count or beat or pat to induce sleep, and even sing " Rock-a-by baby in the tree-top." For creatures wonted through many generations to tree life, swaying would be a natural accompaniment to sleep, and rhythm, the mother of poetry and music that rules the soul in love, war, religion, would be deeply ingrained.
5. Agoraphobia is sometimes a very marked psychosis, which prompts its victims to walk near houses or shelter, and gives them a horror of city squares or open spaces, exposure of which they seek to avoid. In a forest-clad world, and especially for tree-dwellers, dan- ger was directly as distance from this shelter, and we can imagine that many generations were required before man could really feel at home in cleared open spaces, which brought new dangers to locomo- tion, for which arboreal habits are ill adapted. Thus, in types of ar- rest or degeneration, we hark back to far prehistoric conditions.
6. Again, tree life requires its own peculiar kind of locomotion. It developed longer than any other after life had emerged from the primeval sea and perhaps at a greater distance from or above it. Some apes do not even need to drink, but find fluid enough in foods. Most vertebrates, even mammals, especially those living in warm cli- mates, can swim, and many love to; but apes have a cat-like horror of water, and it has been stated that some species can not swim. Human infants, too, as I have elsewhere shown, have an untaught horror of water,1 and man must learn to swim. The movements and organs de- veloped by life among branches seem especially incommensurate with swimming movements, although it must be admitted that there would be less force in this evidence taken by itself.
7. Fear of falling is another instinctive horror of children, whose individual experience has not justified it. This danger, and the per- sistent clinging to clothes, beard, etc., may be a reverberation from a 1 A Study of Fears. Am. Jour, of Psy., January, 1897, vol. viii, p. 166.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 217 life where falling was an incessant danger. On this group of cor- relations considerable stress may be laid.
8. Despite this fear, children have a strange propensity to climb. Before they can walk they often have an " insane desire to climb up- stairs." The modes of creeping and of assuming the erect position have many suggestions of climbing.1 Yet boys often perform prod- igies in this respect, and often with safety akin to that of somnam- bulists. To mount a high tree even without the stimulus of nuts or eggs, perhaps to construct a tree platform like the ourang, and, as in many cases in our returns, to find places where they can readily pass from tree to tree by boughs, even to pass the night in tree houses, with ladders drawn up for mimic safety, is often a passion. Man has an instinctive pleasure to get up high and look down and afar.
9. Among the chief psychic analogies, we must place the extreme imitativeness which is so characteristic of the lowest savages and still more so of monkeys, the very verb to ape indicating where this habit, which may become a mania, is best developed. Motor imita- tions in children culminate early, before inhibitory powers are devel- oped. In no forms of life is the impulse to mimic, which has been lately so well explored by psychologists, so highly developed as in the apes and in men. It is one of the bases of gregariousness, and brings ape and man into singular rapport. So similar are their structures that the movements of each are significant to the other, and to see children watch and mimic apes suggests deep sense of kinship.
10. There are other miscellaneous and merely suggestive intima- tions pointing to the same conclusion seen in some forms of playing hide and seek; some resemblances between the postures of children in sleep and those of the ourang and chimpanzee; several automatisms, often ancestral, that suggest ape life. Wild or feralized children and also idiots often develop ape-like qualities. They often go on all-fours, are expert climbers, and assume, as savages often do in their dances, many strikingly ape-like attitudes and contortions, while often their physical features — jaw, teeth, length of arm, etc. — point in the same direction.
These facts and inferences, while they can not individually or even collectively be said to amount to demonstration, erect, in my judg- ment, a strong probability in favor of the theory which I am urging; at any rate, they give a new genetic interest to the esthetic rapport of the human soul with trees, and make them an object of such unique zest to nature lovers.
Now the significant fact is that most of both the childish animisms and also of these special dendropsychoses fall away or end completely at puberty, so that there is a striking con- 1 Creeping and Walking, by A. W. Trettien. Am. Jour, of Psy., October, 53 218 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE trast between the effect of this epoch upon the feelings for trees and those for flowers. The psychic soil becomes poor and thin for the grosser fancies of trees that bear golden fruit, precious stones, birds and babies, the metamorphoses into god- desses, men and maidens, the crass analysis of leaves as hairs or clapping hands, roots as feet, etc., before or during the earliest school years, and later prepubescent years are autumnal for this deciduous psychic foliage. Here again the early his- tory of the race affords a clue. Frugivorous, primitive, trop- ical man often subsisted largely upon tree fruit, the list of which from veritable trees of life included many. He plucked and ate through the entire year. So, too, on arid plains a tree was precious from its associations with water, shade, shelter, and rest. All this, to say nothing of tree-dwelling, would favor the various tree cults or even worship which higher human religions have condemned, as did so often the ancient Hebrews.
With the northern migrations those who had once dwelt in the tropics or jungle found tree fruit less abundant and edible, shade less desired and better protection than branches and boughs needed, so that their psychic role declined. Druidism was perhaps a survival or attempted restoration of a cherished past, the heart of which had perished. Again, in the north, trees acquired a new utility that was as inconsistent with re- spect for them as was the use of mummies as fuel with the old Egyptian reverence for corpses, as was the function of the butcher in the shambles with the Hindu veneration for animal life, or of the perfume manufacturer with sentimental love for his acreage of roses and violets. Not living, but slaughtered trees for fire-wood and dwellings are now needful. Agriculture, too, makes war upon the forest to clear land for crops. These kings of the vegetable as man is of the animal world suffer dis- enchantment, like currant once wild and pretty in a kitchen garden, and totemism is incompatible with extermination of its species. Somewhere we must perhaps postulate a wood age like that of stone, iron, and bronze, but beginning earlier with the control of fire and continuing after metals and the ore. Once more the century life of a tree is harder to oversee than the annual life of plants and flowers, so that it requires a long period of mental and moral development to attain the same ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 219 standpoint of control and cultivation, and modern forestry is only now fully domesticating trees. Later esthetic interest in them is less in brilliancy of blossom, color, and perfume, and more purely in form.