I conceive, then, that there reveals itself in children’s drawings of the human figure between the ages of three or four and eight a process of development involving differentiation and specialisation. This process, instead of leading to a fuller and more detailed treatment of the front view, moves in the direction of a new and quasi-profile representation, although few children arrive at a clear and consistent profile scheme. Different children appear to find their way to different modifications of a mixed front and side view, some amazingly raw, others less so according to the degree of natural intelligence, and probably also the amount of good example put in their way by drawings in books, and still more by model-drawings of mother or other instructor. I have met with only a few examples of a contemporaneous and discriminative use of front view and profile. Here and there, it is true, one may light on a case of the old lunar scheme surviving side by side with the commoner mixed scheme; but this sporadic survival of an earlier form does not prove clear discrimination. In the case of one boy of five the two forms were clearly distinguished, but this child was from a cultured family, and had presumably enjoyed some amount of home guidance. In the case of the rougher and less sophisticated class of children it appears to be a general rule that the draughtsman settles down to some one habitual way of drawing the human face and figure, which can be seen to run through all his drawings, with only this difference, that some are made more complete than others by the addition of mouth, arms, etc. Even the fact of the use of one or two eyes by the same child at the same date does not appear to me to point to a clear distinction in his mind between a front and side view. The omissions in these cases may more readily be explained as the result of occasional fatigue and carelessness, or, in some cases, of want of room, or as indicating the point of transition from an older and cruder to a later and more complete scheme of profile. This conclusion is supported by the fact that a child of six or seven, when asked to draw from the life, will give the same scheme, whether the model presents a front or a side view. This has been observed by M. Passy in the drawings of himself which he obtained from his own children, by General Pitt-Rivers in the drawings of uneducated adults, and by others. We may say, then, that children left to themselves are disposed each to adopt some single stereotyped mode of representing the human figure which happens to please his fancy.[268] ----- Footnote 268: