If a finer æsthetic feeling is developed the first rude descriptive drawing loses its attractions. A friend, a well-known psychologist, has observed in the case of his children that when they try to draw something pretty, _e.g._, a beautiful lady, they abandon their customary mode of description and become aware of the look of their designs and criticise them as bad. This seems to me a most significant observation. It is the feeling for what is beautiful which makes a child attend closely to the bare look of things, and the beginning of a finer observation of forms commonly takes its rise in this nascent sense of beauty. Indeed, may one not say that only when a germ of the æsthetic feeling for beauty arises, and a child falls in love with the mere look of certain things, can there appear the beginnings of genuinely artistic work, of a conscientious endeavour to render on paper the aspect which pleases the eye? XI. EXTRACTS FROM A FATHER’S DIARY. There has just come into my hands a curious document. It is a sort of diary kept by a father in which he chronicles certain of the early doings and sayings of his boy. It makes no pretence to being a regular and methodical register of progress, such as Mr. F. Galton has shown us how to carry out. It may be said by way of extenuation that the diary sets out in the year 1880, that is to say, two years before Professor Preyer published his model record of an infant’s progress. _En revanche_, it is manifestly the work of a psychologist given to speculation, and this of a somewhat bold type. In the present paper I propose to cull from this diary what seem to me some of the choicer observations and comments on these. If these do not always come up to the requirements of a rigidly scientific standard in respect of completeness, precision, and grave impartiality, they may none the less prove suggestive of serious scientific thought, while any extravagances of fancy and any levity of manner may well be set down to the play of a humorous sentiment, which betrays the father beneath the observer. I may begin my sketch of the early history of this boy by remarking that he appears to have been a normal and satisfactory specimen of his class,—healthy, good-natured, and given to that infantile way of relieving the pressure of his animal spirits which is, I believe, known as crowing. Not believing in the classifications of temperament adopted by the physiologists of a past age, the father forbears from describing his child’s. For my lady readers I may add that he seems, at least by his father’s account, to have been a good-sized, chubby little fellow, fair and rosy in tint, with bright blue eyes, and a limited crop of golden hair of an exceptionally rich, I don’t know how many carat gold, hue. I shall speak of him under his initial, C. _First Year._