MISCELLANEA. 
I. Preliminary Note on the Association of Steadiness and Rapidity 
of Hand with Artistic Capacity. 
By M. L. TILDESLEY, 
Crevnlsov-BeniDgton Slvrh)it, Universilij College, London. 
(1) This preliminary note is based on observations made by Miss M. Dalgliesh at the request 
of Professor K. Pearson. As a teacher of di awing in a large school, she had a long experience of the 
amount of artistic imagination and artistic craft in her pupils, and was able to obtain appreciations 
of their other abilities. The categories she supplied for about 60 pupils were: (a) their ages*, 
(Ij) the number of years during which they had learnt drawingf, (c) their artistic or non-artistic 
capacity, the former being subdivided into imagination and craft, (rf) their mathematical, and 
(e) their musical ability. The steadiness and rapidity of hand were to be tested by the well-known 
"maze "-problem. Three mazes were prepared, I, II, III, of varying degree of tortuosity. The nature 
of the problem was explained to the pupils. They were to enter the maze at A and leave at Q, a 
continuous pencil track being drawn from the point of entry to the point of exit. The performance 
was to be considered the more excellent the fewer the occasions on which the pencil track touched 
the boundaries of the maze path — such touching being termed a "bump." The ideal pencil track 
would keep steadily in the mid-path and parallel to its borders. No distinction however in this 
preliminary experiment was made between a non-bumping wavy line and an ideal track. The 
efficiency due to keeping clear of the boundaries was simply determined by the number of bumps. 
The minimum number of bumps of any girl in any one maze was one and the maximum 72. 
Further, the performance was to be considered the more satisfactory the greater the celerity with 
which the track was completed. The minimum time (taken with a stop-watch) of any pupil in 
any one of the three mazes was 18 sees, and the maximum time practically 3 mins. Contrary to 
what might by some l;e anticipated, there was not a high negative correlation between the number 
of bumps and the time taken. Although on the one hand an over-hasty temperament might lead 
to many bumps, on the other a certain celerity tends to straightness of path while hesitation leads 
to bumping. These points will be more easily grasped from the correlation results provided below. 
(2) A question arises as to the relative difficulty of the three mazes measured in time and 
number of bumps, the average values are: 
Maze I Maze II Maze III 
Average number of minutes taken 2-002 ± -043 1-208 ± -031 1-391 ± -037 
Average number of bumps made 20-68 ± 1-297 15-39 ± -927 31-82 ± 1-392 
These numbers, however, can hardly be taken as measuring the absolute difficulty of the three 
mazes, for (i) they are not of equal length, and (ii) they have not the same number of changes of 
direction. Approximately the following hold: 
Maze I Maze II Maze III 
Length of mid-path ... ... 1025 mm. 700 mm. 730 mm. 
Number of changes of direction ... ... 128 94 84 
* Their mean ages was 14-43 years with a standard deviation of 2-07 years, the actual range being 
from 10 to 18 years. 
t The mean number of years during which the pupil had learnt drawing was 3-84 with a standard 
deviation of 2-20, the actual range being from 1 to 8 years. 
