Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/421

Rh supplied by the reflections of the mirror, which, as we have seen, the infant begins to take for realities, though he soon comes to understand that they are not tangible realities. The looking glass is the best means of elucidating the representative function of the image or "Bild" just because it presents this image in close proximity to the reality, and so invites direct comparison with this.

In the case of pictures where this direct comparison is excluded we might expect a less rapid recognition of the representative function. Yet children show very early that picture semblances are understood in the sense that they call forth reactions similar to those called forth by realities. A little boy was observed to talk to pictures at the end of the eighth month. This perhaps hardly amounted to recognition. Pollock says that the significance of pictures "was in a general way understood" by his little girl at the age of thirteen months. Miss Shinn tells us that her niece, at the age of forty-two weeks, showed the same excitement at the sight of a life-size painting of a cat as at that of real cats. Ten months is also given me by a lady as the date at which her little boy recognized pictures of animals by naming them "bow-wow," etc., without being prompted.

This early recognition of pictures is certainly remarkable, even when we remember that animals have the germ of it. The stories of recognition by birds of paintings of birds, and by dogs of portraits of persons, have to do with fairly large and finished paintings. A child, however, will "recognize" a small and roughly executed drawing. He seems in this respect to surpass the powers of savages, some of whom, at least, are said to be slow in recognizing pictorial semblances. This power, which includes a delicate observation of form and an acute sense of likeness, is seen most strikingly in the recognition of individual portraits. Miss Shinn's niece in her fourteenth month picked out her father's face in a group of nine, the face being scarcely more than a quarter of an inch in diameter. I noticed the same fineness of recognition in my own children.

One point in this early observation of pictures is curious enough to call for especial remark. A friend of mine, a psychologist, writes to me that his little girl, aged three and a half, "does not mind whether she looks at a picture the right way up or the wrong; she points out what you ask for, eyes, feet, hands, tail, etc., about equally well whichever way up the picture is, and never asks to have it put right that she may see it better." The