We must pass still more hurriedly over the plastic efforts of children, which are of much less importance than their drawings, though among the children of savages the disposition to attempt a rude sort of sculpture is much more common than with us. Nachtigal relates that the negro children of Runga formed rhinoceroses and elephants out of the beautiful red clay which abounds there.[594] There are individual instances of a similar kind among civilized children. Ricci has taken some trouble to make a collection of such work by Italian children, and finds it differs less from the efforts of savages than their drawing does.[595] On the whole, however, this branch of art seems to be comparatively little prized or pursued with the exception of making snow men and some caricatures in wax, dough fruits, and the fashioning in sand of gardens, streets, cities, tunnels, and forts which are all about as much imitative play as production. In conclusion I offer a few general remarks on imitation in connection with representative art, where three forms of it can be distinguished—objective, artistic, and subjective imitation. The first consists, as we have seen, in repetition founded on sense-perception and simple memory, while the last permits considerable deviation from reality. The child and probably the savage prefers to produce from memory. Artistic imitation may be defined as the influence of copies produced by other artists. It plays in art the same rôle as that which falls to tradition in general culture, for without it the artistic genius would have little advantage over the gifted savage; indeed, even with him artistic imitation is of great importance. It is not alone the wish to do what others have attained; it is also the _via regia_ to the higher evolution of art. A stimulating task is to trace in history how originality was won by copying. Baldwin’s little girl began to build a church from blocks after a picture. When she has laid the foundation, suddenly her face lights up and she begins to depart from the model. On being reminded by her father that churches are not built in that way she answers, “Oh, no; I am making an animal with a head and a tail and four legs,” and, full of pride in her new discovery, she returns to her work of art, which is no longer a church, but has been turned into an animal.[596] We see here, as in a magnifying glass, the law of progress. Not in random discharges but from real action comes the new; and the action that leads to the new is not original, but must be imitative.[597] This imitative action must not only always have another artist’s work as its model; here may enter our principle of subjective or self-imitation, which, indeed, is more a physiological than a psychological principle since it is no other than all-powerful habit in its spontaneous form, the impulse to repeat.