Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/588

546 persists after the legs have received contour, this being probably another illustration of the comparative neglect of the arm; as in the accompanying drawing by a boy of five (Fig. 18, a). The primal rigid straightness yields later on to the freedom of an



organ. Thus an attempt is made to represent by means of a curve the look of the bent arm, as in the accompanying drawings by boys of five (Fig. 18, b and c). In other cases the angle of the elbow is indicated. This last comes comparatively late in children's drawings, which here, too, lag behind the crudest outline sketches of savages.



LMOST in the exact geographical center of the State of New York there suns itself in the upper valley of a tributary of the Susquehanna a tidy village on which the impoverished fancy of an official map-maker has set the ancient name of Homer. Ancient, indeed, for its region is the village itself. The settlers from Massachusetts and from Connecticut who pushed westward along the valleys of the Mohawk and the Susquehanna, reaching these uplands in the last decade of the eighteenth century, settled here more thickly than elsewhere, and for half a century—till its neighbor settlement of Cortland, once its suburb but soon its rival, crowded it from the pre-eminence—it was, not only in the number of its citizens, but in their thrift, their piety, and their public spirit, the recognized metropolis of the district.

It was here, in the midst of all that is conservative in American life, that on the 7th of November, 1832, was born a man destined in much to be a leader of the fresher thought—