(July 24th, 1796.) S—— observed, that "the lachrymal sack is like Aboulcasem's cup, (in the Persian tales.) It is emptied and fills again of itself; though it is emptied ever so often, it continues full."
The power of reasoning had been more cultivated in S—— than the taste for wit or allusion; yet it seems his mind was not defective in that quickness of seizing resemblances which may lead to wit. He was not praised for the lachrymal sack, and Aboulcasem's cup. (V. Chapter on Wit and Judgment.)
(August 3d, 1796.) C—— (11 years old) after she had heard a description of a fire engine, said, "I want to read the description of the fire engine over again, for whilst my father was describing one particular part, I recollected something that I had heard before, and that took my attention quite away from what he was saying. Very often when I am listening, something that is said puts me in mind of something, and then I go on thinking of that, and I cannot hear what is said any longer."
Preceptors should listen to the observations that their pupils make upon their minds; this remark of C——suggested to us some ideas that have been detailed in the "Chapter on Attention."
(August 1st, 1796.) S——, who had been translating some of Ovid's Metamorphoses to his father, exclaimed, "I hate those ancient gods and goddesses, they are so wicked! I wish I was Perseus, and had his shield, I would fly up to heaven and turn Jupiter, and Apollo, and Venus into stone; then they would be too heavy to stay in heaven, and they would tumble down to earth; and then they would be stone statues, and we should have much finer statues of Apollo and Venus than any they have now at Rome."
(September 10th, 1796.) S—— (within a month of ten years old) read to his sister M—— part of Dr. Darwin's chapter upon instinct; that part in which there is an account of young birds who learn to sing from the birds who take care of them, not from their parents. S—— immediately recollected a story which he had read last winter in the Annual Register. Extract from Barrington's Remarks upon singing Birds. "There was a silly boy once (you know, sister, boys are silly sometimes) who used to play in a room where his mother had a nightingale in a cage, and the boy took out of the cage the nightingale's eggs, and put in some other bird's eggs (a swallow's, I think) and the nightingale hatched them, and when the swallows grew up they sang like nightingales." When S—— had done reading, he looked at the title of the book. He had often heard his father speak of Zoonomia, and he knew that Dr. Darwin was the author of it.
S——. "Oh, ho! Zoonomia! Dr. Darwin wrote it; it is very entertaining: my father told me that when I read Zoonomia, I should know the reason why I stretch myself when I am tired. But, sister, there is one thing I read about the cuckoo that I did not quite understand. May I look at it again?" He read the following passage.
"For a hen teaches this language with ease to the ducklings she has hatched from supposititious eggs, and educates as her own offspring; and the wag-tails or hedge-sparrows learn it from the young cuckoo, their foster nursling, and supply him with food long after he can fly about, whenever they hear his cuckooing, which Linnæus tells us is his call of hunger."
S—— asked what Dr. Darwin meant by "learns it."
M——. "Learns a language."