Juvenile

“ It is often remarked, that children are men and women in miniature; and as they grow up to their full stature, we often see them exhibiting, in broader and more palpable development, the excellencies and defects of their juvenile character ”

“ Most juveniles (less than 40 mm in snout-vent length) can be identified readily. There is a tendency for the dorsal markings of juveniles to consist of several small spots. Apparently with growth the spots usually coalesce, forming a large median blotch, but some adults retain the juvenile pattern. Cochran and Goin (1970:251) erroneously identified several juveniles from Colombia as Hyla palpebrogranulata Andersson. ”

“ And oh, youth!—take my word of it— youth in dressing-gown and slippers, dawdling over breakfast at noon, is a very decrepit, ghastly image of that youth which sees the sun blush over the mountains, and the dews sparkle upon blossoming hedgerows. ”

“ Youth makes a glad part of this picture, as near the brook stands a little child gazing into its mother's face, whilst its wee hand grasps a fugitive wild blossom. The adult figure is seated, giving the inference of content and ease. ”

“ The years of childhood and the subjection of school were behind us; the age of youth was spread out broadly, as a rich, flowery steppe, with an endless horizon,—a curious and unknown land into which we had started on a journey with good omens, youthful, strong, almost with wings on our shoulders, like young eagles. ”

“ Children as comely and as sweet as rodel buds came to us, but ever as their mother and I with fond solicitude watched these buds maturing and bursting into bloom, we looked into each other's eyes and saw sombre shadows lurking there. Intelligent, generous hearted, our children grew to maturity. ”

“ A new generation of wild things had been born. It was a season of Youth, with tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of little children of the wild playing their first play, learning their first lessons, growing up swiftly to face the menace and doom of their first winter. ”

“ The Latin races mature earlier than the Anglo-Saxon; the boy in the tropics reaches puberty more quickly than one in a colder zone; certain abnormalities of physical condition, as well as environment and heredity, conduce to early maturity; and temperamental characteristics contribute, in some degree, to a difference in the time required to traverse the various periods of boyhood. [42] I have known boys of ten who were still infants, and I have in mind a boy friend of sixteen years, with the normal mental development of one of that age, in whom adolescence has not begun. ”

“ When the young get a little strength they attack each other with great fury, and can only be made to desist by the parent bird separating them, and taking one under its fostering care, and holding them at a respectable distance until they reach crane-hood, when they seem to make up in joyous hilarity for the quarrelsome proclivities of youth. ”

“ I understand the wilful ways of youth a darned sight too well. Hot-headed toads—always dashing at things, to show off their fancied cleverness, and then coming to us, with their tails between their legs, to make good their mistakes. You might just so soon say a puppy's wiser than his sire, than tell me the youths know more than us. ”

“ But take them civilised or natural, those who love and observe little children no more expect to find that peculiar exquisite charm of the girl-child which I have endeavoured to describe in the boy, than they would expect the music of the wood-lark and the airy fairy grace and beauty of the grey wagtail in Philip Sparrow. And yet, incredible as it seems, that very quality of the miraculous little girl is sometimes found in the boy and, with it, strange to say, the boy's proper mind and spirit. ”

“ When the child imitates, he begins to understand. Let him imitate the airy flight of the bird, and he enters partially into bird life. Let the little girl personate the hen with her feathery brood of chickens, and her own maternal instinct is quickened, as she guards and guides the wayward motion of the little flock. Let the child play the carpenter, the wheelwright, the wood-sawyer, the farmer, and his intelligence is immediately awakened; he will see the force, the meaning, the power, and the need of labor. ”

“ Ontogenetic change in coloration is slight or non-existent in buckleyi, pearsoni, and taurinus, except that juveniles lack ventral markings. A dark blotch on the back and distinct transverse bars on the limbs are evident in juveniles of verrucigerus; these markings are obscured in the adults. Juveniles of leprieurii are olive-brown with yellow dorsolateral stripes; the transverse dark marks, characteristic of the adults, appear before the stripes are lost. ”

“ The child becomes a youth, and the youth becomes man, by virtue of a process not so very different from that which transforms the caterpillar into a butterfly or the tadpole into a frog. As truly as the caterpillar takes on wings, and the tadpole lungs and limbs, of which neither had any trace before, the child and the boy take on not only habits and instincts and ways of getting on in the world, but actual new structure as well. ”

“ When she heard him sing and whistle in the woods that afternoon, she had thought him a young man. There was the joyousness and buoyancy of youth in his looks and voice. To-night, however, she saw that he was not a boy, but a man fully her own age. ”

“ Sometimes he would gather up all the children and take them to the meadow, and teach them about the leaves and stones, the flowers and birds and ants, as his brother used to teach him, and then they would play the very plays the wind and flowers and birds had played. So he called it his kindergarten,—his child-garden,—and he began to show to the whole world that little children must learn and grow in the same sweet way that flowers do. ”

“ Youth is upright as an Alif, or slender and bending as a branch of the Bán-tree which we should call a willow-wand, [FN#307] while Age, crabbed and crooked, bends groundwards vainly seeking in the dust his lost juvenility. ”

“ THE BOY’S VIEWPOINT A CORRECT understanding of boy-nature is conditioned on one’s ability to obtain his point of view, which differs widely from that of the adult. It has been stated in a previous chapter that the viewpoints of a boy at six, ten, fourteen, and eighteen years of age differ as widely from each other as those of four adults of remotely differing natures and temperaments. We frequently make the mistake of assuming that the boy is a small edition of a man, possessing faculties, emotions, desires, and understanding the same as in the adult but developed in a lesser degree. ”

“ Among them, most eager, most intense, most frequent of all associations, there is a boy with nerves all a-tingle at the vast sweet mystery that rustled in every wood, following the call of the winds and the birds, or wandering alone where the spirit moved him, who never studied nature consciously, but only loved it, and who found out many of these Ways long ago, guided solely by a boy's instinct. ”

“ It is, of course, a long step from this recognition of the contrast and mutual emphasising of colour to that of its quiet harmonious combinations.
That little children have their likings in the matter of form is, I think, indisputable, but they are not those of the cultivated adult. One of the first out-goings of admiration towards form is the child's praise of "tiny" things. The common liking of children for small natural forms, e.g., those of the lesser birds, insects, and sea-shells, is well known. ”

“ As much variety of character and countenance may be found among them, as exists in their elders, while the picture is so much the more pleasing, as the lines are always softened by something of the freshness of childhood. This sweet-faced little girl, that bright-eyed boy, this laughing, merry young rogue, yonder timid, gentle child, this playful, kitten-like creature, that frank and manly lad, will each in turn attract attention ”

“ Babies little and babies big, babies fat and babies thin, babies with curly hair, babies with straight hair, babies with no hair at all, babies pretty and babies plain, babies solemn and babies gay, babies black-eyed and brown, babies blue-eyed and gray, they gazed at the visitor in varying degrees of unwinking wonder, and then, with the nonchalance of childhood, went on with their play. ”

“ I have watched individuals sitting on the seashore playing with the sand for an hour at a time; so that when I shall attempt to define the plays of adolescents, let me not be understood as meaning that these are the only plays of adolescents, for adolescents do all that the preceding groups have done. That which I shall attempt to describe will be the plays that the adolescents have that are not found to any particular extent before adolescence, and which may thus be called characteristics of adolescence. ”

“ We shall see hundreds of small children, not more than five or six years of age, carrying, fast asleep on their shoulders, the baby of the household, its tiny smooth brown head swinging hither and thither with every movement of its small nurse, who walks, runs, sits, or jumps, flies kites, plays hop-scotch, and fishes for frogs in the gutter, totally oblivious of that infantile charge, whether sleeping or waking. If no young sister or brother be available, the husband, the uncle, the father, or grandfather hitches on his back the baby, preternaturally good and contented. ”

“ Lastly, a most interesting theory is that which is associated with the name of Groos, and which is best expressed in the sentence: "Animals do not play because they are young, but they have their youth because they must play," play being regarded as the preparation for future life activities. ”

“ The bird that flutters and twitters in the parent nest is a very different thing from the emancipated fledgeling, feeling its newly acquired power of flight, and soaring far up and out into the woods and over [36] the fields; and the boy whose experience of life is confined to the household of his parents, is not less different from the lad who has gone beyond it into the bustle and turmoil of that epitomized world,—a public school. ”

“ To see to the children, and not to neglect them!— And if you're a widower, just throw a cursory Glance in, at times, when you go near the Nursery!— —Perhaps it's as well to keep children from plums, And from pears in the season,—and sucking their thumbs! ”

“ Flitting to and fro were numberless colored children, bare-headed, bare-legged, and often, with not a little of their sleek bodies gleaming through the innumerable rents of their garments, their eyes glittering like black beads, and their white teeth showing on the slightest provocation to mirth. ”

“ Colt, calf, lamb, kitten, pup, and boy all exhibit this tendency of nature. These things are the cause of growth, not only physical, but mental and moral as well. The educational value of play is one of the most important factors in the boy’s evolution. It is the expression of his being, his growth, his aspirations and his future. By play, he trains his eye, his hand, his mind and his muscles; his moral conceptions are formed; he learns to distinguish between right and wrong, and the recognition of individual and property rights [110] begins to emerge from his nascent moral consciousness. ”

“ But, when the adult and the young have diverged from some point (a) in their past history, the line LI, which is the sure of nm to L and of nm to I, represents the change which the young is bound to make in reverting to the adult form. ”

“ I leave to children, inclusively, but only for the term of their childhood, all and every, the flowers of the fields, and the blossoms of the woods, with the right to play among them freely, according to the customs of children, warning them at the same time against thistles and thorns. ”

“ The striking propensity of children from infancy up to the age of 12 to 14 is so universal that it has impressed itself upon all who have even casually observed children. It has often been termed the age of striking and all through child literature appeal is made to it. The pounding of the small child upon the plate, table, chair or floor is proverbial. A boy with stick for sword and a mullen stock or flock of geese as enemy we have come to associate together. ”

“ At the beginning of the period of childhood for which the Junior Course is intended, approximately nine years of age, there appears to be in the life of the normal boy or girl a real transition as the traits and interests of earlier years give way to those of full fledged boyhood and girlhood. Strange premonitions of impending physical and mental changes now appear, with suggestions of riper years that are rapidly approaching. The physical and mental changes of this period are accompanied by an awakening of social consciousness. ”

“ And if nature had been niggardly in one respect, she had been generous in others; Toddles, for all his size, possessed the heart of a lion and the strength of a young ox, and he used both, with black and bloody effect, on the eyes and noses of the call-boys and younger element who called him Toddles. ”

“ Comparing now the three major groups—early childhood, later childhood, and adolescence—it appears that the plays of early childhood are individualistic, noncompetitive, and for the accomplishment and observation of objective results. The plays of later childhood are individualistic, competitive, involve active muscular co-ordinations and sense judgments. The plays of adolescence are socialistic, demanding the heathen virtues of courage, endurance, self-control, bravery, loyalty, enthusiasm, and the savage occupations of hunting, fishing, swimming, rowing, sailing. ”

“ Children everywhere, all along. Curly-pated children, bare-legged children, well-dressed children, and children in rags, but all shouting, screaming, laughing, smiling, or singing, and all as happy, seemingly, as the summer’s day was long. ”

“ Once more, the Kindergarten professes to take account of the joyousness of the child’s nature: to allow him full and free expression for the glee that is in him, without the ‘rampaging’ which follows if he is left to himself to find an outlet for his exuberant life. ”