Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/578

536 contour soon emerges, and thus we get the transition to a possible outlining of objects. With practice the child acquires by the second or third year the usual stock in trade of the juvenile draughtsman, and can draw a sort of straight line, curved lines, a roughish kind of circle or oval, as well as dots, and even fit lines together at angles. When this stage is reached we begin to see attempts at real though rude likenesses of men, horses, and so forth. These early essays are among the most curious products of the child-mind. They follow standards and methods of their own; they are apt to get hardened into a fixed conventional manner which may reappear even in mature years. They exhibit with a certain range of individual difference a curious uniformity, and they have their parallels in what we know of the first crude designs of the untutored savage.

It has been wittily observed by an Italian writer on children's art that they reverse the order of natural creation in beginning instead of ending with man. It may be added that they start with the most dignified part of this crown of creation, viz., the human head. A child's first attempt to represent a man proceeds, so far as I have observed, by drawing the front view of his head. This he effects by means of a clumsy sort of circle with a dot or two thrown in by way of indicating features in general. A couple of lines may be inserted as a kind of support, which do duty for both trunk and legs. The circular or ovoid form is, I think, by far the most common. The square head in my collection appears only very occasionally and in children at school, who presumably have had some training in drawing horizontal and vertical lines. The accompanying example (Fig. 2) is the work of a Jamaica girl of five, kindly sent me by her teacher.

This first attempt to outline the human form is, no doubt, characterized by a high degree of arbitrary symbolism. The use of a rude form of circle to set forth the human head reminds one of the employment by living savage tribes of the same form as the symbol of a house (hut?), a wreath, and so forth. Yet there is a measure of resemblance