Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/422

390 same thing was noticed in the other children of the family, and the mother tells me that her mother observed it in her children. I have found a further illustration of this indifference to the position of a picture in the two children of another friend of mine. Prof. Petrie tells me that he once watched an Arab boy looking at a picture-book. One, a drawing of horses and chariot, happened to have a different position from the rest, so that the book being held as before, the horses seemed to be going upward; but the boy was not in the least incommoded, and without attempting to turn the book round easily made it out. These facts are curious as illustrating the skill of the young eye in deciphering. They may possibly have a further significance as showing how what we call position—the arrangement of a form in relation to a vertical line is a comparatively artificial view of which a child as yet takes little if any account. He may be able to concentrate his attention so well on form proper that he is indifferent to the point how the form is placed. Yet this matter is one which well deserves further investigation.

A further question arises as to whether this "recognition" of pictures by children toward the end of the first year necessarily implies a grasp of the idea of a picture—that is, of a representation or copy of something. The first reactions of a child, smiling, etc., on seeing mirror images and pictures, do not seem to show this, but merely that he is affected much as he would be by the presence of the real object, or, at most, that he recognizes the picture as a kind of thing. The same is, I think, true of the so-called recognition of pictures by animals.

That children do not, at first, seize the pictorial or representative function is seen in the familiar fact that they will touch pictures us they touch shadows and otherwise treat them as if they were tangible realities. Thus Pollock's little girl attempted to smell at the trees in a picture and "pretended" to feed some pictorial dogs.

When the first clear apprehension of the pictorial function is reached it is difficult to say. Miss Shinn thought that her niece "understood the purport of a picture quite well" at the age of forty-five weeks. She draws this conclusion from the fact that at this date the child, in answer to the question, "Where are the flowers?" leaned over and touched the painted flowers on her aunt's gown, and then looked out to the garden with a cry of desire. But this inference seems to me very risky. All that the child's behavior proves is that she "classed" real and painted