Yet another mode of Investigation is that of Experimenting; every normal child is what Froebel calls “a self-teaching scientist.” “The material must be known not only by its name, but by its qualities and uses.… For this reason the child examines the object on all sides; for this reason he tears and breaks it; for this reason he puts it in his mouth and bites it. We reprove the child for his naughtiness and foolishness; and yet he is wiser than we who reprove him. An instinct which the child did not give himself, the instinct which rightly understood and rightly guided would lead him to know God in his works, drives him to this.”--_E., p. 73._ It may well be through his ceaseless experimenting that the little child begins to draw, gains what the late Mr. Ebenezer Cooke called “a language of line,” or as Froebel puts it, notices “linear phenomena, which direct his attention to the linear properties of surrounding objects.” “A child has found a pebble, a fragment of lime or chalk. In order to determine by experiment its properties, he has rubbed it on a board near by, and has discovered its property of imparting colour. See how he delights in the newly discovered property, how busily he makes use of it! … but soon he begins to find pleasure in the winding, straight, curved, and other forms that appear. These linear phenomena direct his attention to the linear properties of surrounding objects. Now the head becomes a circle, and now the circular line represents the head, the elliptical curve connected with it represents the body; arms and legs appear as straight or broken lines, and these again represent arms and legs; the fingers he sees as straight lines meeting in a common point, and lines so connected are, for the busy child, again hands and fingers; the eyes he sees as dots, and these again represent eyes; and thus a new world opens within and without. For what man tries to represent, that he begins to understand.”--_E., p. 75._ I have watched a child go through the process of discovering “linear phenomena,” just as Froebel describes it, no doubt from his own observation. A boy of three, having folded a piece of paper for the roof of a house, was colouring it, by rubbing on red chalk, when he called out, “Oh! I’m making lines.” The other children went on rubbing, but Phil made “lines” till the roof was finished. But Froebel does not leave unnoticed the fact that the very earliest “drawing” is an outgrowth of the muscular action to which his instinct of activity is urged by the stimulus of contact.