be attempted; and that so a gradual approximation will be made towards imitations having some resemblance to the realities.  The extreme indefiniteness which, in conformity with the law of evolution, these first attempts exhibit, is anything but a reason for ignoring them.  No matter how grotesque the shapes produced; no matter how daubed and glaring the colours.  The question is not whether the child is producing good drawings.  The question is, whether it is developing its faculties.  It has first to gain some command over its fingers, some crude notions of likeness; and this practice is better than any other for these ends, since it is the spontaneous and interesting one.  During early childhood no formal drawing-lessons are possible.  Shall we therefore repress, or neglect to aid, these efforts at self-culture? or shall we encourage and guide them as normal exercises of the perceptions and the powers of manipulation?  If by furnishing cheap woodcuts to be painted, and simple contour-maps to have their boundary lines tinted, we can not only pleasurably draw out the faculty of colour, but can incidentally produce some familiarity with the outlines of things and countries, and some ability to move the brush steadily; and if by the supply of tempting objects we can keep up the instinctive practice of making representations, however rough; it must happen that when the age for lessons in drawing is reached, there will exist a facility that would else have been absent.  Time will have been gained; and trouble, both to teacher and pupil, saved.

From what has been said, it may be readily inferred that we condemn the practice of drawing from copies; and still more so that formal discipline in making straight lines and curved lines and compound lines, with which it is the fashion of some teachers to begin.  We regret that the Society of Arts has recently, in its series of manuals on “Rudimentary Art Instruction,” given its countenance to an elementary drawing-book, which is the most vicious in principle that we have seen.  We refer to the Outline from Outline, or from the Flat, by John Bell, sculptor.  As explained in the prefatory note, this publication proposes “to place before the student a simple, yet logical mode of instruction;” and to this end sets out with a number of definitions thus:—­

     “A simple line in drawing is a thin mark drawn from one point to
     another.

     “Lines may be divided, as to their nature in drawing, into two
     classes:—­

     “1. Straight, which are marks that go the shortest road between
     two points, as A B.

     “2.  Or Curved, which are marks which do not go the shortest road
     between two points, as C D.”