Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/872

 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

true with the Gibbon and the ourangoutang. A connection between the third left frontal gyrus and articulate speech has beep shown. The third winding of the frontal gyms is incomplete with the anthropoid and other apes ; otherwise they would speak. N. C. MACNAMARA, in Archiv fiir Anthropologie, New Series, Vol. Ill, No. 2, 1904. H. E. F.

The Influence of Sex on Drawing. Graphologists know how to recognize " the sex of handwriting ; " they diagnosticate, from a simple examination of a written text, the author's sex. The same holds with drawing : an experienced observer will distinguish the drawing of a boy from that of a girl. But this, with the graphologist, is an impression not based on scientific analysis.

A delicate question is that of the respective merits of the sexes. Men and women teachers, when questioned, replied to us in various ways. With some the girls are more precocious, more awake, and their drawings are given as proof ; with others, the boys are rated as superior on account of their aptitude for observ- ing, and of their brain, truly more powerful, more creative. In the schools where the boys were the brothers of the girls we concluded that the male and female brains were equal. But this is true only for young children.

In the choice of a subject boys and girls are separated by their respective tastes. The boys make mechanical designs ; the girls, those of dresses and com- plicated toilettes.

When representing the human figure, the execution of a subject shows a wide separation between the two sexes. Ask a boy or a girl to draw a " good man." The little girl, like the adult woman not trained in drawing, will reply : " I do not know how to make a man." The boy experiences the same difficulty when asked to draw a person of the opposite sex. We were able to compare many samples by baring a man and a woman drawn on the same leaf. It was easy to tell the sex of the author. Drawing is then homosexual and corresponds to sex.

We can consider this fact, that it is easier for a girl to design a woman and a boy to represent a man, as a sort of law. Here is proof that man is anthropo- centric. The result is that the artist puts into his work some details of his personality ; unconsciously he reproduces himself in his pictures, his statues. Thus an artist of talent, having large frontal bosses, reproduces this fault in his own anatomy in all the portraits he executes. A woman, knowing how to draw, indicates carefully the long eyelashes which are the essential detail of her physiognomy.

With the very young child, the sexes draw in identical fashion. Toward nine or ten the feminine characteristic, the rounded breast, appears. If it is a drawing of either a young girl or boy, the breasts are indicated with complacence, Drawing reflects preoccupation. The physiological hatching of sexual desire, vague in the life of the child, plays a great role in the psychic life of the adult man. One knows that the sexual emotion is one of the forces which make the artist work. The youth designs with care and curiosity, and according to natural tendencies. But soon beauty appears to the young man, and often this appearance of beauty develops simultaneously with the ideas of sexes. It is difficult for us to fix with precision the time of the appearance, in the man, of the sense of beauty. In a child of eight years capable of drawing remarkably, this does not appear at ail ; the esthetic sense does not yet exist. At the age of thirteen this side of art awakens in the boy. And here education plays an important part. It is allowable, in any ease, to compare the vague, inexact xsthetic sense of the child to the sense which shows itself with animals in the choice, the sexual selection, of individuals the most harmoniously colored, the most beautiful, as Darwin has pointed out. D. PAUL SALMON, in Bulletins et memoires de la Societe d' Anthropologie de Porit. Fifth Series, Vol. V, No. 3. H. E. F.