Fig. 45 (c).—A quadruped.
Fig. 45 (e).—A mouse.
The legs are of course all visible. The strangest inattention to number betrays itself here. As we saw, a child in beginning his scribble-drawing piles on lines for the legs (see above, p. 334, Fig. [1]). A girl between three and four years of age endowed a cat with two legs and a bird with three (see Fig. 45 [(a)] and [(b)]).[[276]] A boy in his sixth year drew a quadruped with ten legs (Fig. 45 [(c)]). They are often drawn absurdly out of position. In more than one case I find them crowded behind, as in the accompanying drawing of some quadruped by the same little girl that drew the cat and the bird, and in a drawing of a mouse by another child about the same age, viz., three and a half years (Fig. 45 [(d)] and [(e)]). They commonly remain apart from one another throughout their course, following roughly a parallel direction. But this simple scheme is soon modified, first of all by enlarging the space between the fore and the hind legs, and then by introducing some change of direction answering to the look of the animal in motion. This is most easily effected by making the fore and the hind pair diverge downwards, as in Fig. 43 [(b)] and [(c)] (p. 373). In rarer cases the divergence appears between the two legs of the fore and of the hind pair (Fig. 45 [(f)]). The knee-bend is early introduced as a means of suggesting motion. Either the legs are all bent backwards, as in Fig. 45 [(g)] (cf. above, Fig. 44 [(e)]); or, with what looks like a perverted feeling for symmetry, each pair is bent inwardly, as in Fig. 45 [(h)]. The forms are often extraordinary enough, a preternatural thickness of leg being not infrequently given, and the knee-joint occasionally taking on grotesque shapes as if the little draughtsman had just been attending a class on the anatomy of the skeleton. The hoof is drawn in a still freer manner, various designs, as the bird-foot, the circle, and the looped pattern, appearing here as in the case of the human foot (Fig. 45 [(i)] and [(j)]; cf. Figs. 43 [(c)] and 44 [(a)] (p. 373)).
Fig. 45 (f).
Fig. 45 (g).
