Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/423

Rh flowers together, while she recognized the superiority of the former as the tangible and probably the odorous ones. The strongest evidence of recognition of pictorial function by children is, I think, their ability to recognize the portrait of an individual. But even this is not quite satisfactory. It is conceivable, at least, that a child may look on a photograph of his father as a kind of "double." The boy C took his projected photograph very seriously as a kind of doubling of himself. The story of the dog, a Dandy Dinmont terrier, that trembled and barked at a portrait of his dead mistress, seems to me to bear this out. It would surely be rather absurd to say that the demonstrations of this animal, whatever they may have meant, prove that he took the portrait to be a memento likeness of his dead mistress.

We are apt to forget how difficult and abstract a conception is that of pictorial representation, how hard it is to look at a thing as pure semblance having no value in itself, but only as standing for something else. A like slowness on the part of the child to grasp a sign, as such, shows itself here as in the case of verbal symbols. Children will, quite late, especially when feeling is aroused and imagination specially active, show a disposition to transform the semblance into the thing. Miss Shinn herself points out that her niece, who seems to have been decidedly quick, was as late as the twenty-fifth month touched with pity by a picture of a lamb caught in a thicket, and tried to lift the painted branch that lay across the lamb. In her thirty-fifth month, again, when looking at a picture of a chamois defending her little one from an eagle, "she asked anxiously if the mamma would drive the eagle away, and presently quite simply and unconsciously placed her little hand edgewise on the picture so as to make a fence between the eagle and the chamois." Such ready confusion of pictures with realities shows itself in the fourth year and later. A boy nearly five was observed to strike at the figures in a picture and to exclaim, "I can't break them." The Worcester collection of observations illustrates the first confused idea of a picture. "One day F, a boy of four, called on a friend, Mrs, C, who had just received a picture, representing a scene in winter, in which people were going to church, some on foot and others in sleighs. F was told whither they were going. The next day he came and noticed the picture, and looking at Mrs. C and then at the picture, said, 'Why, Mrs. C, them people haven't got there yet, have they?'"

All this points, I think, to a slow and gradual emergence of the idea of representation or likeness. If a child is capable in moments of intense imagination of confusing his battered doll with