Besides the anthropometric and psycho-physical investigations of the
child carried on in the scientific laboratory with exact instruments and
unexceptionable methods, there is another field of "Child-Study" well
worthy our attention for the light it can shed upon some of the dark
places in the wide expanse of pedagogical science and the art of
education.

Its laboratory of research has been the whole wide world, the
experimenters and recorders the primitive peoples of all races and all
centuries,--fathers and mothers whom the wonderland of parenthood
encompassed and entranced; the subjects, the children of all the
generations of mankind.

The consideration of "The Child in Folk-Thought,"--what tribe upon
tribe, age after age, has thought about, ascribed to, dreamt of, learned
from, taught to, the child, the parent-lore of the human race, in its
development through savagery and barbarism to civilization and
culture,--can bring to the harvest of pedagogy many a golden sheaf.

The works of Dr. Ploss, _Das kleine Kind_, _Das Kind_, and
_Das Weib_, encyclopadic in character as the two last are, covering
a vast field of research relating to the anatomy, physiology, hygiene,
dietetics, and ceremonial treatment of child and mother, of girl and
boy, all over the world, and forming a huge mine of information
concerning child-birth, motherhood, sex-phenomena, and the like, have
still left some aspects of the anthropology of childhood practically
untouched. In English, the child has, as yet, found no chronicler and
historian such as Ploss. The object of the present writer is to treat of
the child from a point of view hitherto entirely neglected, to exhibit
what the world owes to childhood and the motherhood and the fatherhood