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.[210] A child, however, will ‘recognise’ 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 recognising 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 quarter of an inch in diameter.[211] I noticed the same fineness of recognition in my own children. ----- Footnote 210: See Romanes, _Animal Intelligence_, pp. 311 and 453 ff. The only exception is a photograph which is said to have been ‘large,’ p. 453. Footnote 211: _Op. cit._, i., p. 74. ----- One point in this early observation of pictures is curious enough to call for especial remark. A friend of mine, a psychologist, 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 same thing was noticed in the other children of the family, and the mother tells me that her mother observed it in her children. I have found a further illustration of this indifference to the position of a picture in the two children of another friend of mine. Professor Petrie tells me that he once watched an Arab boy looking at a picture-book. One, a drawing of horses and chariot, happened to have a different position from the rest, so that the book being held as before, the horses seemed to be going upwards; but the boy was not in the least incommoded, and without attempting to turn the book round easily made it out. These facts are curious as illustrating the skill of the young eye in deciphering. They may possibly have a further significance as showing how what we call position—the arrangement of a form in relation to a vertical line—is a comparatively artificial view of which a child as yet takes little if any account. He may be able to concentrate his attention so well on form proper that he is indifferent to the point how the form is placed. Yet this matter is one which well deserves further investigation.[212] ----- Footnote 212: Professor Petrie reminds me that a like absence of the perception of position shows itself in the way in which letters are drawn in early Greek and Phœnician writings. -----