[280]. From the Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1882-83, p. 206. The common appearance of both legs in these Indian drawings means, I take it, that the rider is on the side of the horse.
[281]. See Ricci, op. cit., pp. 17-23.
[282]. Andree observes that in Australian drawings objects behind one another are put above one another as in a certain stage of Egyptian art (op. cit., p. 172).
[283]. Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, 1883-84, p. 444 ff.
[284]. The tendency to identify the drawings of the child and the savage led to an amusing error on the part of a certain Abbé Domenech, who in 1860 published his so-called Livre des Sauvages, which purported to contain the graphic characters and drawings of North American Aztecs, but proved in reality to be nothing but the scribbling book of a boy of German parentage. The drawings are of the crudest, and show the artist to be much more nasty-minded than the savage draughtsmen.
[285]. This is supported, in the case of children who have begun to wield the pen, by the exercises of the copy-book.
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.