The book was written with the cooperation of G. Stanley Hall and the Bureau of American Ethnology.
It presents an exhaustive comparison/equivalence of the development western white child and the savage, and also with the insane and criminal. It draws on Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin and G. Stanley Hall evolutionary thought.
The book uses drawings from non-European children and women to trace equivalences and differentiations in terms of kinds of people.
Chapters include:
I. The meaning of helplessness of infancy
II. The meaning of youth and play
III. The resemblances of the Young
IV. The periods of childhood
V. The language of childhood
VI. The arts of childhood
VII. The child as revealer of the past
VIII. The child and the savage
IX. The child and the criminal
X. The child and woman
XI. Summary and conclusions
Some fragments:
"That the child, in many respects, resembles the savage is an idea familiar even to some of the writers of antiquity, who saw that the childhood of the race and the childhood of the individual had not a few things in common. [...]
For Miss Paola Lombroso, whose Essays in Child Psychology is one of the most interesting books about the child we possess: 'The child is a little compressed, synthetic picture of all the stages of man's evolution' - an evolution which has been controlled in all its history by the same principle, 'the adaptation to life with the least effort', the 'pulsing eurhytmia that rules all things' (369, p. 172)
In his introduction to this book Professor Cesare Lombroso speaks of childhood as a 'curious world, in which we get glimpses of primitive man - in mental development, in the emotions, in impulsivity, in the prevalence of imagination over intelligence.' (p. 291)