ABSTRACT
Even the child of nine months looks at an animal picture-book with keen interest or turns over an illustrated catalogue, and, with its scanty vocabulary, can already name many of the pictures correctly. This power of recognition is remarkable for this reason looked at from an optical point of view; the pictures are in no way actual copies of the things represented. Observations tend more and more to prove that originally the recognition of pictures depends almost entirely or quite on the outline. By the correlative method the child is shown numerous pictures of objects connected in some way. In spite of the joy that the child has in gay pictures, recognition in the early years is not aided by colour, and in nowise disturbed by wrong colours or entire lack of them. The most complicated feature of pictures is perspective, by which the some dimensions of solid bodies are represented on the some dimensions of a surface.
