blance between some accidental figure his hand had formed and some object he has seen. Certain it is that the educative influences round about him count for much. Conscious imitation enters early and plays an important part. The children in my room learned to draw from each other. They would copy figures in part or in whole. The children that came in from the reservation learned to draw from the children

seated nearest them in the room, and each slate reflected the style of drawings of the immediate neighbors. A change in seating would result in a change in the style of drawing. The results here given are from personal observation and individual experiment. I realize that one should not generalize from a few particulars. I give my results that others may observe and compare conclusions with mine.

គន

28

26

26

23

Man.

Life forms, 201.

Other forms, 136.

Life forms, 39. Other forms, 454.

These first drawings of the child as the result of outer stimuli, such as the sight of a plastic surface, be it moist sand, a frosted pane, or a bit of slate, have their parallel in the first crude drawings of primitive peoples. The petroglyphs found in all parts of the world stand for an impulse common to humanity.

The child's drawings early begin to reflect his environment, and suggest what there is in the environment that interests him most.

In examining these papers one can hardly fail to be impressed with the broad sameness in the drawings of the younger children. Age and, what approximately goes with age, develop ment, stand for much more than tribe and local environment.

The difference of sex is early reflected in the drawings. At five one can detect no difference in the appearance of the papers; at six the appearance of the paper reflects the sex and the tabulation suggests a growing difference; at seven the difference is strongly marked and the preferred form corroborates this difference of appearance.

I have classed animal figures only as life forms. The flowers drawn by the majority of girls are usually conventional figures, drawn for the purpose of ornament. If the ornamental figure was in a flower pot, or if it seemed to have its origin in the ground, I considered it a flower. If the drawing represented a flower so that one could tell what it stood for even if it were not in a flower pot or was not springing from the ground, I still classed it with flowers. Other ornamental figures were classed as conventional. A majority of the figures classed as flowers were those ornamental designs which the child seemed to use to represent flowers. Conventional designs are more often chosen by the girls, while figures that express life and motion mean most to the boys.

Children show much interest in the human figure. After seven the boys show much the greater interest. Again, boys draw more often the male figure, and girls the female. Boys seldom draw girls or women. Two Indian women are all such figures found in 390 papers. The girls show comparatively greater interest in the male figure than the boys in the female. Miss Gallagher, of Lincoln, Neb., informs me that this is not true of the drawings of white boys. Is there here an unconscious reflection of the contempt felt for women in the Indian home?

Houses and trees are of nearly equal interest. The difference in birds and chickens is not great, but in the drawing of other animal forms there is a wide difference. The preferred animal for the boys is the horse. This greater fondness of the boys for drawing horses may be due in part to their closer association with them, and also to their more responsive natures to the qualities of the horse. Boys draw horses more frequently than cows, dogs more frequently than cats. Girls show a preference for the rabbit.

The drawings from Tacoma showed water, those from Oneida a timbered country and the logging industry, and many others reflected plainly the local environment.

The child's notion of things, as reflected in his drawings, is crude, ill formed, and fragmentary. He has an abundance of memory images, but he cannot use them with precision. He fails to combine different sense impressions into a sharply defined concept. He remembers a great many different sense impressions of an object, rather than those which belong to a single view of it. His representation of an object stands for all that he remembers about it. His world is a strange jumble of sense impression. Images crowd into the mind and cover the paper.

As shown by the table, the number of objects drawn by the girls of five is greater than those drawn by the boys of the same age. The maximum number of figures is reached by the girls at six, by the boys at seven. Then comes a perceptible falling off in numbers for the girls at seven and the boys at eight. My children seemed to lose interest in drawing when they learned to write, but later this interest returned. The variety of objects drawn is greatest for the girls at eleven, and for the boys at twelve. Allowing for minor fluctuations, the number of objects increases and then gradually decreases. The rise represents the widening of the mental horizon and the fall stands for the selection of favorite forms from this broader field. With young children the interest is not fixed, the mind is plastic and growing. Later on the interest centers along certain lines.

As may be seen by the table, the maximum in all cases is reached by the girls earlier than by the boys. This points to an earlier development for girls, and is corroborated by other investigations.

Out of this confusion of sense impressions the child gradually clarifies and defines his concep

tion of things. He does not become logical all at once. The inconsistencies gradually disappear. He will sometimes repeat a drawing that has become stereotyped, and so is not representative of his mental development, though it does show clearly the force of the motor memory.

The child's drawings reveal to us that his world is not ours. When we have fully grasped this truth we are ready to begin to learn how to teach. If we know the child's nature we may direct his interests; if we can direct his interests we may mold his life. Pipestone, Minn.

LOUISA MCDERMOTT.

The Relation of Child Study to Sunday
School Work

NCE upon a time, in a far-away land, there lived a Teacher. He taught, not in dusty, crowded rooms, but by the roadside, on the margin of the sea, on the brow of a mountain, beneath the grove, and in the quiet of a friend's dwelling. He followed no course of study; he gave no examinations; marked no papers; estimated nobody's attainments in fractions of hundredths. His school was an ungraded school, reaching from the cradle to the grave. His salary was small. He taught the aristocratic and the poor, the righteous and the unrighteous. He forced no pupils into His school by any law of compulsory education, or by a truant officer, but wherever He stopped He gathered about Him a little knot of disciples and taught. His text-book was the whole created universe of God, interpreted in the simple language of the humblest man or woman. Thus neglecting every regulation which would be considered essential in a well-ordered school of to-day, this man so fixed His teachings in the hearts of His pupils that they became flaming torches which have blazed His name to us through some thousands of years with the incomparable designation of the Great Teacher. When people thronged around Him, full of the pride of their own learning, strong in the strength of their own achievements, arrogant in the confidence of their own powers, asking Him what they might do with their achievements, strength, and power, what great thing they might accomplish in order that they should be worthy to enter the Kingdom of God, He took a little child and set it in the midst of them and said, "Except ye become as this child, ye cannot enter." That is one difference between the Great Teacher and most of

us teachers. He set a child in the midst of a lot of grown folks and told them to become like the child. We set a grown person in the midst of a lot of children and tell them to become grown up.

In the field of education there has been a revival-I might say with all reverence a religious revival-during the past five years. Never has there been such an awakening of inquiry, of investigation, of sympathetic interest, as has come with the introduction of the methods and ideals of what is generally known as Child Study. Wherever teachers gather in large numbers, the meeting devoted to Child Study is sure to be the most crowded of all. It is a subject in which not only teachers are interested, but parents as well. Mothers are organizing everywhere little circles and round tables. for the study of problems connected with child life. Already the results obtained have begun to modify to no small extent the practice of our schools.

The church, through the instrumentality of the Sunday school, has a responsibility resting upon it for the moral and religious training of the young which I believe it does not as a body adequately appreciate. In Germany children are taught religion two hours a week throughout the entire school course by trained teachers. While this does not make them always reaily religious men and women, it does always acquaint them to a degree astonishing to the American with the facts about the Bible, and the essential principles of religious faith. Why is it that an intelligent and thoroughly moral friend of mine absolutely refuses to allow his children to go to Sunday school? Why is it that another distinguished teacher says that while his mother did not make him promise not to smoke or chew or play cards, she did exert her influence to urge him not to read Sunday school books, for which warning he has never ceased to be thankful? It is, in my judgment, because we are not giving sufficient care and attention to the Sunday school work. I would not for a moment be considered as attacking the Sunday school work or as minimizing the difficulties under which it is carried on at present, nor would I fail to recognize the great advance that has been made. But in spite of the advance and progress that can be pointed out, I will maintain that we need a real revival of interest in the Sunday school, the first step in which must be a thorough realization of the importance of the work it has to do.

The nation entrusts the moral welfare of its children to the Sunday school. It makes no other provision for their training, at any rate. In our country the doctrine of the separation of church and state is so firmly believed that it is not likely that we shall soon see any form of religious training in public schools. The only agent for supplying this moral and religious instruction is the Sunday school. Is there any danger of our making the Sunday school too good under these circumstances? Is there any justification for our not introducing as rapidly as possible into the Sunday school every method which has been found helpful in the public school? Is there any reason why we should not look forward to the day when in thousands of churches the Sunday school shall be taught by paid, professional experts, just as is the day school; a condition which at present exists, so far as I know, in just two Sunday schools in the United States, and that in Jewish congregations in New York city and Chicago.

My subject is the relation of Child Study, this new pedagogical gospel of the common school, to Sunday school work. My thesis is that every good result of Child Study discovered in the public school, every good method of Child Study, everything good about Child Study, should be transferred to the Sunday school as quickly as possible, that the latter may reap the full benefit of as good influences as are to be found. The Sunday school deserves to have the best methods. Indeed, for the very reason that it meets for so short a time, if any impression at all is to be made, it needs to have better methods than are used in the public schools. But the more technical professional methods employed by teachers in public schools are at present impracticable in the Sunday school, because the teachers are untrained and unpaid, and have comparatively little time to give to the work. Child Study, however, appeals as strongly to Sunday school workers as to paid teachers in the school. It is every bit as much within their sphere and within their capacity. They ought to enter into this goodly new land and possess it.

I can only indicate a few lines of study which will be immediately available and immediately helpful in Sunday school work. The first important field of Child Study to which I will call attention in this connection is that which concerns itself with gaining a knowledge of the surroundings of the children outside of the school.

The methods employed to obtain this knowledge are various. One is to have sympathetic and thoughtful interviews with the parents at the time when the pupils enter the school, and this, when done with tact, gives results of the greatest value. This method is open to every Sunday school teacher, and ought to be employed by every Sunday school teacher. The school gives the child an artificial environment for a short time. How can it give the child the proper environment without knowing the life it leads outside of the school? No child can appreciate good instruction of any kind when half starved. A teacher in one of our public schools noticed that one little girl always went away by herself to eat her luncheon, while the others gathered in groups and had a merry time. Wondering at the child's lack of sociability, and thinking perhaps it was due to some mental defect which should be removed, the teacher one day invited the child to lunch with her, and by this means discovered that the child's lunch box contained, carefully wrapped up in a napkin, just as the lunches of the other children were prepared, a nice solid, appetizing stone. The little girl did not like to have her companions know that she was too poor to bring a lunch, and so each day she went through the motions, bringing the stone and pretending to eat it. Another teacher had great cause to complain of a boy on account of his stupidity, especially his lack of attention. But the problem was solved when she discovered that breakfast was an unknown event in that boy's home.

I have recently been looking over some papers from children in the Chicago schools, which contain, incidentally, many touching reve1ations in regard to the home life of the children. One especially is so pathetic that I shall here give part of it to you. It is from a boy of twelve with an astonishing foreign name, and he writes like this, speaking of the books he has read since last fall: "The best of these books that I have read was Longfellow's poems. He teaches child, man, and woman to live better lives by reading his poems. I would like to see a civilized child, man, or woman who read Longfellow's poems and did not like them. I have not a book of my own, but I am going to get one soon." This boy with a poet's soul has some books now. Instances might be indefinitely multiplied, but enough have been given to show the absolute necessity of knowing something, everything, if possible, of a child's life and en

vironment before we undertake to instruct that child in either the wisdom of the schools or in things unseen and eternal. This is a side of the work which doubtless needs more emphasis in the public school than in the Sunday school. It is much easier for the Sunday school teacher to get into close personal relations with children and to know their home surroundings than it is for the public school teacher.

The children are vastly more important than their surroundings even. We can perhaps mod. ify the surroundings, certainly we can understand them very easily, but to understand even one small child is a long and difficult task. But there is nothing more fascinating in all the world than the study of a child. Why should we be willing to spend months and years and lives in the study of bugs and creeping things, and not find the study of the natural history of a child an intensely interesting pastime? God himself, having exhausted every other line of creation, created man in His own image as the most wonderful of all existing beings, and in every child He is repeating the process of the sixth creative day. Let us begin our study of the children by inquiring what they know. We sometimes assume that they know too much, just as we often assume that they know too little. Dr. G. Stanley Hall made what is now a classical study on the contents of children's minds on entering school, based on an examination of several thousand Boston school children. The following are a few of the results:

bread is swelled yeast; trees are stuck in the ground by God and are rootless; meat dug from the ground; potatoes picked from trees; cheese squeezed butter; the cow says "bow-wow;" the pig purs; grasshoppers give grass; bees give beans and beads; kittens grow on pussy willows; all honey is from honeysuckles; poplin dress made from poplar trees; when the cow lows it somehow blows its own horn.

These were city children and they were supplied for the most part with books which contain only reference to country life, which, of course, they did not understand. Among the papers that I have been reading recently I have one from a little boy of thirteen who artlessly states a profound educational truth. In speaking of a certain book he says, "I do not like Papa's Twelve Sons (the title), because I do not understand the words." How much childish sorrow and misunderstanding and dislike comes "because I do not understand the words." And, to apply it to our Sunday school, how much misunderstanding, inattention, and unruliness comes because we are trying to teach the children something they do not and cannot understand. Very interesting investigations have been made into children's theological ideas, which go to show that the essential principles of their religious conceptions resemble those of very primitive peoples. A quart cup will hold no more than two pints. A child's mind will profit by no other ideas than those it can assimilate or "apperceive," to use the technical term. Whatever theological notions are presented, therefore, must be, if they are to find a lodging place, naive and artless, simple and primitive, like the nature of the child. For anything smacking of the subtlety of doctrine he can have no real appreciation. He can understand God as a good man, as a kind father, but not as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.

A child's religion must be an intensely personal religion. God knew this when he cast the Bible into vivid and dramatic form that would attract and hold the most primitive and simple minds. When shall we appreciate the great truth that any teaching, to be effective, must find a point of contact with the child's nature as it is, and that the only way in which that point of contact can be discovered is by careful study of the individual child? I am told that in first developing the copper mines in the Lake Superior regions, whenever the miners came to a particularly pure deposit of copper they left