HOW AND WHY OF COMMON THINGS
Editors' Note to Mother and Teacher.—There is a period in a little child’s life when he is just an animated question mark. He wants to know the how and why of everything. Now this betrays a very large and useful curiosity. Curiosity, persisted in and intelligently directed, has made all of the great discoveries of the world. You can discourage it if you keep on answering: "Oh, just because it is," or: "Run away now, and don’t bother me." But stop and think if you really do want to nip that beautiful flower of the soul in the bud. Until long after he can read in his little school books, the child, unhelped, can make little use of our vast storehouse of print. Father and mother and teacher are the sources of wisdom to him. If these fail him, he can only fall back into vacuity, or mischievous or dangerous experiments.
"But," you say, "so many of his questions are foolish." Are they? Or is it because you don’t know the answers, are unwilling to admit your ignorance, and unwilling also to take a little trouble? Some of the questions are unimportant, no doubt, some impertinent. Those kinds are matters of good sense and good manners. Very few of the questions are foolish. To the little child, the world is full of delightful mysteries. His senses are keen to first impressions, and he observes a multitude of natural phenomena. He instinctively knows, long before he can reason about it, that every effect has a cause. Hence his endless hows and whys.
Simply with the idea of satisfying this curiosity. and relieving the harassed parent and teacher, we collected nearly one hundred typical questions asked by children of active minds, and searched out the answers. The result was very astonishing. Nine-tenths of them steered inquiry straight into the natural sciences—not only into botany and zoology, but into physics and astronomy. We began to understand the adult point of view a little better. Far from being foolish, these questions were profound. It would require the wisdom of the sage to answer all of them, or a library of reference books far beyond the reach of the ordinary family, school or village. It revealed to us a new wonder world of the little child’s mind; and humility that we fall so far below his demands. If we can answer a few of his questions here, and change the attitude of his parents and teachers toward his questions, we shall feel that we have helped the world along a little way.
Now, when a little boy asks: l " Why does doggie turn ’round and ’round, before he lies down?" or "Why does rain fall in little round drops? " we shall be able to look the little questioner frankly in the face, and say: "I don’t know, dear, but I’ll try to find out."
So here we start on a voyage of discovery into the fairy-world of how and why.
