Figure 3

A photograph of a set of 12 wooden dolls. One can readily see that while the dolls vary widely in size, they all nevertheless possess the same shape. According to the minima rule of Hoffman and Richards¹⁷, all of these objects, regardless of their scale, possess two distinct parts (i.e., the “head” and the “body” are separated by a saddle-shaped trough; the single largest doll in this figure has an extra part, a supporting base). This photograph was taken by the first author, J. Farley Norman.