Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/580

538 one which seems to us "grown-ups" most self-assertive and most resentful of indignity, viz., the nose. These moon-faces with two eyes and a mouth are very common among the first drawings of children. The mouth, on the other hand, is much less frequently omitted. The same thing seems to hold good of the drawings of savages. The eyes are rarely omitted. The single dot may perhaps be said to stand for "eye." Some drawings of savages have the two eyes and no other feature, as in the accompanying example from Andree (Fig. 4, a). On the other hand, a child



will, as we have seen, sometimes content himself with one eye. This holds good not only where the dot is used but after something like an eye-circle is introduced, as in the accompanying drawing by a Jamaica girl of seven (Fig. 4, b).

In these first attempts to sketch out a face we miss a sense of relative position and of proportion. It is astonishing what a child on first attempting to draw a human or animal form can do in the way of dislocation or putting things into the wrong place. The little girl mentioned by E. Cooke on trying, about the same age, to draw a cat from a model; actually put the circle representing the eye outside that of the head. With this may be compared the drawings of den Steinen and other Europeans made by his Brazil Indian companions, in which what was distinctly said by the draughtsman to be the mustache was in more than one instance set above the eyes (Fig. 4, c). When dots are inserted in the linear scheme they are apt at first to be thrown in anyhow. The two eyes, I find, when these only are