The first likings for musical composition are based on this instinctive feeling for rhythm. It is the simple tunes, with well-marked easily recognisable time-divisions, which first take the child’s fancy, and he knows the quieting and the exciting qualities of different rhythms and times. Where rhythm is less marked, or grows highly complex, the motor responses being confused, the pleasurable interest declines. It is the same with the rhythmic qualities of verses. The jingling rhythms which their souls love are of simple structure, with short feet well marked off, as in the favourite, ‘Jack and Gill’. Coming now to art as representative we find that a child’s æsthetic appreciation waits on the growth of intelligence, on the understanding of artistic representation as contrasted with a direct presentation of reality. The development of an understanding of visual representation or the imaging of things has already been touched upon. As Perez points out, the first lesson in this branch of knowledge is supplied by the reflexions 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 excluded we might expect a less rapid recognition of the representative function. Yet children show very early that picture-semblances are understood in the sense that they call forth reactions similar to those called forth by realities. A little boy was observed 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.[208] 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.[209] Ten months is also given me by a lady as the date at which her little boy recognised pictures of animals by naming them ‘bow-wow,’ etc., without being prompted. ----- Footnote 208: _Mind_, iii., p. 393. Footnote 209: _Notes on the Development of a Child_, i., p. 71 f. -----