The question remains, why do the lines of the Forms run in such strange and peculiar ways? the reply is, that different persons have natural fancies for different lines and curves.  Their handwriting shows this, for handwriting is by no means solely dependent on the balance of the muscles of the hand, causing such and such strokes to be made with greater facility than others.  Handwriting is greatly modified by the fashion of the time.  It is in reality a compromise between what the writer most likes to produce, and what he can produce with the greatest ease to himself.  I am sure, too, that I can trace a connection between the general look of the handwritings of my various correspondents and the lines of their Forms.  If a spider were to visualise numerals, we might expect he would do so in some web-shaped fashion, and a bee in hexagons.  The definite domestic architecture of all animals as seen in their nests and holes shows the universal tendency of each species to pursue their work according to certain definite lines and shapes, which are to them instinctive and in no way, we may presume, logical.  The same is seen in the groups and formations of flocks of gregarious animals and in the flights of gregarious birds, among which the wedge-shaped phalanx of wild ducks and the huge globe of soaring storks are as remarkable as any.

I used to be much amused during past travels in watching the different lines of search that were pursued by different persons in looking for objects lost on the ground, when the encampment was being broken up.  Different persons had decided idiosyncracies, so much so that if their travelling line of sight could have scored a mark on the ground, I think the system of each person would have been as characteristic as his Number-Form.

Children learn their figures to some extent by those on the clock.  I cannot, however, trace the influence of the clock on the Forms in more than a few cases.  In two of them the clock-face actually appears, in others it has evidently had a strong influence, and in the rest its influence is indicated, but nothing more.  I suppose that the complex Roman numerals in the clock do not fit in sufficiently well with the simpler ideas based upon the Arabic ones.

The other traces of the origin of the Forms that appear here and there, are dominoes, cards, counters, an abacus, the fingers, counting by coins, feet and inches (a yellow carpenter’s rule appears in one case with 56 in large figures upon it), the country surrounding the child’s home, with its hills and dales, objects in the garden (one scientific man sees the old garden walk and the numeral 7 at a tub sunk in the ground where his father filled his watering-pot).  Some associations seem connected with the objects spoken of in the doggerel verses by which children are often taught their numbers.