It might be thought that, though a child at this inexperienced stage were unable to produce the correct form of a familiar object, he would at once detect the incorrectness of the one he sets down. No doubt, if he were in the attitude of cold critical observation, he would do so: in fact, as Mr. Cooke and others have shown, he sees the absurdities of his workmanship as soon as they are pointed out to him. But when drawing he is in another sort of mood, akin to that imaginative mood in which he traces forms in the plaster of the ceiling, or in the letters of his spelling-book. He means to draw a man or a horse, and consequently the formless jumble of lines becomes, to his fancy, a man or a horse. His first drawings are thus, in a sense, playthings, which, like the battered stump of a doll, his imaginative intention corrects, supplements, and perfects. With repetition, and that amount of supervision and guidance which most children who take a pencil in hand manage to get from somebody, he begins to note the actual character of his line-effects, and to associate these with the movements which produce them. A straight horizontal line, a curved line returning upon itself, and so forth, come to be differentiated, and to be co-ordinated with their respective manual movements. We may now pass to the second stage, the beginning of true linear representation, as illustrated in the first abstract schematic treatment of the human face and figure. A question arises at the very outset here as to whether, and if so to what extent, children re-discover this method of representation for themselves. Here, as in the case of child-language, such as ‘bow-wow,’ ‘gee-gee,’ tradition and example undoubtedly play their part. A parent, or an older brother and sister, in setting the first models, is pretty certain to adopt a simple scheme, as that of the lunar face; and even where there is no instruction a child is quick at imitating other children’s manner of drawing. Yet this does not affect the contention that such manner of drawing is eminently childish, that is, the one a child finds his way to most readily, any more than the fact of the nurse’s calling the horse ‘gee-gee’ in talking to baby affects the contention that ‘gee-gee’ is eminently a baby-name.