STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 389 



supplied by the reflections of the mirror, which, as we have seen, 

 the infant begins to take for realities, though he soon comes to 

 understand that they are not tangible realities. The looking 

 glass is the best means of elucidating the representative function 

 of the image or " Bild" just because it presents this image in 

 close proximity to the reality, and so invites direct comparison 

 with this. 



In the case of pictures where this direct comparison is ex- 

 cluded we might expect a less rapid recognition of the representa- 

 tive function. Yet children show very early that picture sem- 

 blances are understood in the sense that they call forth reactions 

 similar to those called forth by realities. A little boy was ob- 

 served to talk to pictures at the end of the eighth month. This 

 perhaps hardly amounted to recognition. Pollock says that the 

 significance of pictures " was in a general way understood " by 

 his little girl at the age of thirteen months.* Miss Shinn tells us 

 that her niece, at the age of forty- two weeks, showed the same 

 excitement at the sight of a life-size painting of a cat as at that 

 of real cats.f Ten months is also given me by a lady as the date 

 at which her little boy recognized pictures of animals by naming 

 them " bow-wow/' etc., without being prompted. 



This early recognition of pictures is certainly remarkable, 

 even when we remember that animals have the germ of it. The 

 stories of recognition by birds of paintings of birds, and by dogs 

 of portraits of persons, have to do with fairly large and finished 

 paintings. J A child, however, will " recognize " a small and 

 roughly executed drawing. He seems in this respect to surpass 

 the powers of savages, some of whom, at least, are said to be slow 

 in recognizing pictorial semblances. This power, which includes 

 a delicate observation of form and an acute sense of likeness, is 

 seen most strikingly in the recognition of individual portraits. 

 Miss Shinn's niece in her fourteenth month picked out her father's 

 face in a group of nine, the face being scarcely more than a quar- 

 ter of an inch in diameter.* I noticed the same fineness of recog- 

 nition in my own children. 



One point in this early observation of pictures is curious 

 enough to call for especial remark. A friend of mine, a psychol- 

 ogist, writes to me that his little girl, aged three and a half, " does 

 not mind whether she looks at a picture the right way up or the 

 wrong ; she points out what you ask for, eyes, feet, hands, tail, 

 etc., about equally well whichever way up the picture is, and 

 never asks to have it put right that she may see it better/' The 



* Mind, iii, p. 393. f Notes on the Development of a Child, i, p. 71 f. 



\ See Romanes, Animal Intelligence, pp. 311 and 463 ff. The only exception is a photo- 

 graph which is said to have been " large," p. 453. * Op. crt., i, p. 74. 



