ABSTRACT
The problem of air is highly interesting to children and a large number of spontaneous questions bear witness to their natural curiosity about wind and air in general. Sully 1 mentions children, some of whom believed that wind was caused by a large fan waved by an unseen being, and others that it was produced by the movement of trees. Stanley Hall 2 quotes the following questions of a boy of six: “What makes the wind blow? Is someone pushing it? I thought it would have to stop when it went against a house or a big tree. Does it know that it is making our pages blow over?” Miss Morse Nice 3 took down these questions of a child of four: “What is air? How do people make air? What makes air?” These questions show that there exists in very young children a spontaneous interest in air and wind, together with a spontaneous tendency to think of wind as both alive and produced by human beings (animism and artificialism combined).
