Very noticeable is the influence of habit in this abstract treatment. By habit I here mean hand-memory, or the tendency to combine movements in the old ways, though this is commonly aided, as we shall see, by “association of ideas”. Thus a child falls into a stereotyped way of drawing the human face and figure; line follows line in the accustomed sequence; the only variation showing itself is in the insertion or omission of nose, ears, or arms; these uncertainties being due to fluctuations of energy and concentration. A child’s art is, in respect of its unyielding sameness, a striking example of a conservative conventionality. He gets used to his pencil-forms, and pronounces them right, to the greater and greater neglect of their relation to natural forms. Habit shows itself in other ways too. Notice, for example, how a child, after adding the trunk, will go on inserting the arms into the head as he used to do. Such a habit is an affair not only of the hand but of the eye. The arms have by repeated delineation come in the art-sphere to belong to the head. Coming now to the more elaborate and sophisticated stage of five or thereabouts, in which the shape of eyes, mouth, and nose is shadowed forth, the difficult appendages as hands and feet attempted, and the profile aspect introduced, we notice first of all a step in the direction of naturalism. The child like the race gets tired of his bald primitive symbolism, and essays to bring more of concrete fulness and life into his forms. Only this first attempt does not lead to a continued progress, but stops short at what is rude and arbitrary enough, substituting merely a second rigid conventionalism for the first. This transition indicates an advance in technical skill; hence we find a measure of free and bold invention, as in the management of the facial features, _e.g._, the scissors-shaped nose, and still more in the treatment of hands and feet, which is at once exaggerative, as in the big burr forms, and freely conventional, as in the leaf-pattern for the hand, and the wondrous loop-designs for the foot. Yet though this freer treatment shows a certain technical advance it illustrates the effect of the limitations of the child’s executive power. Thus the new partially profile figures are very apt to lean, looking as if they were falling backwards. It is probable that the wide-spread tendency to make the profile face look towards the spectator’s left rather than his right is due to the circumstance that the eye can much better follow and control the pencil in this case than in the opposite one. In the latter the hand is apt to interfere with seeing the line of the face, especially if the pencil is held near its point.