Another curious point in this early deciphering of drawings and photographs is that a child seems indifferent to the _position_ of the picture, holding it as readily inverted as in its proper position. One little girl of three and a half "does not mind (writes her father) 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". A like indifference to the position of a picture, and of a letter, has been observed among backward races. Surprising as this early recognition of pictures undoubtedly is, it is a question whether it necessarily implies any idea of the true nature of them, as being merely semblances or representations of things. That children do not, at first, clearly seize the meaning of pictures is seen in the familiar fact that they will touch them just as they touch shadows, and otherwise treat them as if they were tangible realities. One little girl attempted to smell at the trees in a drawing and pretended to feed some pictorial dogs. This may have been half play. But here is a more convincing example. A girl was moved to pity by a picture of a lamb caught in a thicket, and tried to lift the branch that lay across the animal. With less intelligent children traces of this tendency to take pictorial representation for reality may appear as late as four. One American boy having looked at a picture of people going to church in the snow, and finding on the next day that the figures in the drawing were exactly in the same position, seemed perplexed, and remarked naïvely: "Why, Mrs. C., these people haven't got there yet, have they?" It is not surprising after this to learn that some children are slow in seizing the representative character of acting. If, for example, a father at Christmas-tide disguises himself as Santa Claus, his child will only too readily take him to be what he represents himself to be, and this when the disguise, especially in the matter of the voice, leaves much to be desired. Children, like uneducated adults, have been known to take a spectacle on the stage of a theatre too seriously. Yet their own play, which, though serious at the moment, is known afterwards to be "pretending," probably renders many of them particularly quick in interpreting dramatic play.