There is another domain of childish activity closely bordering on that of play where a like suffusion of the world of sense by imagination meets us. I refer to pictures and artistic representations generally. If in the case of adults there is a half illusion, a kind of oneirotic or trance condition induced by a picture or dramatic spectacle, in the case of the less-instructed child the illusion is apt to become more complete. A picture seems very much of a toy to a child. A baby of eight or nine months will talk to a picture as to a living thing; and something of this tendency to make a fetish of a drawing survives much later. But it will be more convenient to deal with the attitude of the child-mind towards pictorial representations in connexion with his art-tendencies. The imaginative transformation of things, more particularly the endowing of lifeless things with life, enters, I believe, into all children’s pastimes. Whence comes the perennial charm, the undying popularity, of the hoop? Is not the interest here due to the circumstance that the child controls a moving thing which in the capricious variations of its course simulates a free will of its own? As I understand it, trundling the hoop is imaginative play hardly less than riding the horse-stick and slashing its flanks. Who again that can recall early experiences will doubt that the delight of flying the kite, of watching it as it sways to the right or to the left, threatening to fall head-foremost to earth, and most of all perhaps of sending a paper ‘messenger’ along the string to the wee thing poised like a bird so terribly far away in the blue sky, is the delight of imaginative play? The same is true of sailing boats, and other pastimes of early childhood. I have here touched merely on the imaginative and half-illusory side of children’s play. It is to be remembered, however, that play is much more than this, and reflects much more of the childish mind. Play proper as distinguished from mere day-dreaming is activity and imitative activity; and children show marked differences in the energy of this activity, and in the quickness and closeness of their responses to the model actions of the real nurse, real coachman, and so forth. That is to say, observation of others will count here. Again, while social surroundings, opportunities for imitation, are important, they are by no means all-decisive. Children show a curious selectiveness in their imitative games, germs of differential interest, sexual and individual, revealing themselves quite early. It may be added that a child with few opportunities of observation may get quite enough play-material from storyland. But play is never merely imitative, save indeed in the case of unintelligent and ‘stoggy’ children. It is a bright invention into which all the gifts of childish intelligence may pour themselves. The relation of play to art will engage us later on. _Free Projection of Fancies._