than seventeen thousand four hundred and seventy pounds. Under the heads of the different studies, hints will be hereafter given as to the best means of giving preliminary stimulus.

When the pupil has begun a new subject, he must not, at first, be left to himself. It is not with book-tasks as it is with nature-tasks. Books do not supply (as Nature often does) the means of experimenting, of varying the aspect of the subject, and of obtaining new materials to reason about. Consequently, if a child cannot make out a book-task, he either gives it up as hopeless, or becomes fretful, dispirited, and listless; or else he dashes at some wrong conclusion, and contracts the habit of "plunging." At first, therefore, everything in a new subject must be done by the child under the supervision of the teacher.

Not that the child is to be told everything. This would be fatal to his self-reliance and progress. Nor that he is to be permitted to make no mistakes. This would be going against Nature's method of teaching by correction. But the tutor's business will be in the course of each lesson to secure the observance of that Golden Rule of teaching which interchanges easy tasks with difficult ones, at once encouraging self-reliance and discouraging conceit, sustaining interest and developing the understanding.

Although the teacher must be prepared to give much time and trouble in the introductory lesson, or lessons, of each subject, he must nevertheless not lecture, he must converse. But the guidance of the dialogue will require almost as much preparatory thought as a lecture. Not a word must be retracted (unless deliberately, see § 30) and, above all, no confused impressions must be given. It would be better that the pupil should receive a clear erroneous impression—which can afterwards be clearly proved to be false, and removed-than two or three impressions, each more or less true, and each inconsistent with the others.

N.B.-If the teacher cannot spare the necessary time for this preparation, he must not attempt to eke out the deficiency by giving his pupils tasks out of a book to prepare without supervision. Let them play. They will be far better employed in playing than by learning slovenly habits of thought or practice under the appearance of working.

24. READING.

Reading may be conveniently begun in the late autumn and continued till the early spring, when it may be dropped, or at all events lightened, to be taken up again and perfected in the following winter. The advantage of this course is, that during the long evenings, when the child cannot be playing in the open air, the reading-task finds him at greater leisure and (for want of other things to do) he is likely to welcome the study as a variety of occupation.

If children are in the country and can find plenty to do, reading

may perhaps be deferred till six; otherwise it may be begun at five, or four; and there have been not a few cases where it has even been begun at three, without apparent disadvantage. But so early a commencement requires watchful care on the part of the teacher, that the lesson may be given up when it appears to cause the slightest uneasiness or strain to the child.

It is now a recognized principle among teachers that children must not be taught or allowed to spell before they read. Reading must be taught first, spelling afterwards.

In teaching reading, the right plan is to begin, not with letters, but with syllables, such as cat, can, cap, sit, fit, pit, and the like, which the child must be taught to pronounce and remember, as syllables, without any regard (at first) to the letters c, a, t, n, p, etc., composing them. The system has this obvious advantage, that it is freed from the contradictions attending the alphabet or spelling-system. When a boy is told that a is called ai (as in pain), and yet that c, a, t spells cat-not cait-he is plunged at once into difficulties that should be deferred as long as possible, I mean, the anomalies of English pronunciation. the bad readers whom I have ever had to do with," says Preceptor, "have learned reading on this bad system; and whenever I hear a big fellow of ten or eleven stumbling over hard words, I always put my ear close to him and catch him spelling." The new system, which is sometimes called the Look and Say system, avoids the stumbling-block of the alphabet.

A great number of good reading-books are now in existence based upon the Look and Say, or (as it might perhaps be better called) the Syllable principle; but the use of them requires some discretion in the teacher, for the following reason. Some of the more modern books on this system, being adapted for teaching children in large classes, are very properly intended to suit the dullest of the dull; and they consequently introduce a vast amount of drill by repeating variations of syllables, whether they have, or have not, any existence in our language, e. g. badge, cadge, fadge, madge, dadge, sadge, etc. Now all this, though it may be necessary, and not perhaps very tedious for a slow, steady, but somewhat dull boy, may be unnecessary, tedious, and even irritating for a quick and lively one. Again, other reading-books, of a somewhat earlier date, good in other respects, may be a little deficient in syllable-drill.

The best plan for the teacher at home will be to use one of the more rapidly progressive reading-books, yet not to trust entirely to it, but to reinforce it by writing (of course in printed characters) in the margin of the reading-book, little supplements, from time to time introducing the child to new syllables. However excellent and stimulating the book may be, the child will generally be more stimulated by these additions than by the original text; and though he may not be called on for some time to write or print on his own account, he is unconsciously being prepared for learning how to do so by watching his tutor print.

It is absolutely necessary that the child should be taught to pronounce words apart from their context as well as to read them in their context. Otherwise he will read by rote, trusting to his memory, and will make little progress in distinguishing syllables. "It is surprising," says Preceptor, "to what extent the powerful memory of the young will impose upon a teacher, and still more upon an inexperienced Examiner, in this matter of reading. I remember that in a certain Elementary school—this was in the old days when books were 'set' for examination, and there was no reading at sight-a boy passed with flying colors, although he could not read at all, or (to put the same fact in the shape in which the teacher expressed it to me) he could read just as well with the book upside down as in the ordinary position."

After a few lessons in reading supplemented thus by the teacher, the child may be taught the sounds of the consonants, pronouncing them, however, not in the ordinary way with vowels, ess, tee, eff, etc., but as the mere beginnings of sounds, & being a mere hiss, and ƒ a sound of the teeth against the lips, &——, ƒ———. Those consonants which sound differently before different vowels should not be taught by themselves; for example, c must be taught at first, not by itself, but as part of can, cat, cane, car, care, and then in cot, con, cone, cod, and in cud, cut, cub. Not till he is familiar with these words, and on the point of passing to words of two syllables, should he be introduced to cell, cent, cit, cite, and be told to distinguish between the soft sound of ce or ci on the one side, and the hard sound of ca, co, cu on the other. The same of course applies to g.

Most unfortunately, reading (which is almost necessarily the first subject in which a child receives special lessons) cannot proceed far without bringing the pupil into contact with the anomalies of English pronunciation, which constitute a sad stumbling-block in the way of definite and logical teaching. The reading-book should certainly avoid these for the first few lessons; and the teacher should freely alter any words in the text-book, however simple in themselves, which seem to introduce such anomalies too soon (e. g. the word put, which is anomalous for a child hitherto accustomed only to the sound of u in up, sup, cut, etc.).

"I am not sure," writes Preceptor, "whether the plan of thus altering the book and substituting a new word-'because this word is pronounced pút, and you are not yet accustomed to that sound'-is not as stimulative a way as any to induce a child to remember the exceptional word; for many children (of the quicker sort, at all events) are exceptionally stirred to remember, and to prove that they can remember, facts that are said to be 'too difficult' for them. If also a list is printed by the tutor for the child containing anomalous words thus 'put aside for the present,' they will be the more easily recollected; and in due course no difficulty at all will be found in them when the pupil meets with them in a context which hleps to make them intelligible."

The transition will be easy from words of one syllable to words of two. Cannot presents very little more difficulty than can-not. The few abnormal final syllables, such as -ble and -tion, will be soon mastered, not by themselves, but by being repeated in such words as stable, a-ble, ca-ble, fa-ble; and then all will go smoothly.

The home-teacher will do well to beware of "books written in words of one syllable." Sandford and Merton and Robinson Crusoe, tortured into monosyllables, are sure to contain passages in a tedious or inexact style; and to turn good English into bad is neither justifiable nor necessary in order to teach beginners how to read.

A great deal more may be done than is customary in the way of teaching children to read with modulation and distinctness. No doubt some have naturally a better voice and a keener sense of rhythm than others; but all can be kept from drawling and droning if they hear people about them read and speak well, and if they are accustomed from the first to read as they speak. No boy drawls or drones in the playground or the nursery.

Drawling, like all other unnatural reading, is caused by reading aloud what one does not understand or enjoy, or by hearing others drawl. The remedy against it is, first, to see that the child can understand and enjoy his earliest reading lessons; second, to prevent the child from ever hearing bad reading.

In order to produce a habit of natural reading there should be interspersed several short questions and answers in the early reading exercises, because in familiar dialogues it is more easy for a child to read naturally, that is to say, as he speaks, e. g. "Can Tom see me now? Yes, Tom can see me, and I can see Tom." The teacher should for some time to come read every passage aloud before the pupil reads it. Grant that the pupil may sometimes be hereby led to trust to his ears, recalling what the teacher has read, rather than to his eyes, examining the syllables before him; yet this danger is slight compared with that of falling into an artificial monotone, by stumbling over the passage unassisted, pronouncing it without intelligent appreciation.

It is one of the greatest advantages of home-training over classtraining for young children that reading can be taught much more easily at home than at school. In a class, bad readers must necessarily sometimes be "put on," and their bad reading drags down the rest of the pupils. For as in stammering, so in reading, children are wonderfully and unconsciously imitative. At home the child need never (it is to be hoped) hear any but good reading, and may thus, by unconscious imitation, acquire a good style. At school to read with any taste or feeling is often so rare, that the boy who is guilty of it is voted a "prig" by his schoolfellows, where the standard of reading does not happen to be unusually high. It cannot be too often repeated' that no child (in whom the organs of speech are duly developed) will read badly if he is well taught and does not hear bad reading. But it

should be added that children are more prone to imitate bad reading than good, and that the hearing of a very little bad reading goes a long way to prevent the formation of the habit of reading well,1

Defects of utterance require special treatment. Very little attention can be paid to them at schools; but by parents and tutors a great deal could be done by practicing a child regularly in the sounds in which he is deficient. For example, if he does not pronounce the dentals distinctly he may be exercised daily in repeating a list of words, such as tender, delicate, splendid, dutiful, dusty, tattered and torn, etc., having first pronounced the initial sounds-t and d-several times; and so of other sounds.

25. QUESTIONING ON READING.

In order to accustom the pupil to remember what he has read, a few simple questions should be asked, bearing upon each reading lesson, even upon the first.

The questions should be varied in two ways. Thus, supposing the reading lesson says, "The cat is on my bed," the question may be put first as an ellipse (to use the term employed by Stow). "The cat is on -?" and the pupil fills up what is wanting-"my bed "; secondly, it may be put as a question for information. "Where is the cat?" "On my bed."

Later on, pupils will find in their reading lessons expressions that require explanation; and then the teacher will need a knowledge of the art of explaining. The best explanation is that in which the teacher tells the least and elicits the most. For this purpose he must avoid lecturing and keep close to dialogue, putting before his pupils some facts which they know, that he may lead them to understand some fact which they do not know. What we know, as children, is, for the most part, what we can see; and therefore this process of teaching is called by Stow "picturing out," because, by it, the teacher and pupils together depict or represent things unseen by things seen.

Although Stow spoke of this system as new, it is in reality the basis of all teaching by parables. The Parable of the Sower, for example,

1 If it had not been a principle of this book that it should contain as little as possible that the Author had not tested by experiment, another method of teaching reading would have been described at some length.

This method would begin with sounds, and then proceed to syllables. Thus, the teacher would make the child pronounce the initial p-, b—‚ƒ—, (not with vowels, but merely as initial sounds,) and then set down on the black-board the printed symbols. Next he would make the child pronounce at, it, et, and afterwards set down these symbols. He would then make the child pronounce p, b, ƒ before the at, it, et, and when the child had done it he would set down pat, pit, pet, bat, bit, bet, etc., in each case beginning first with the child's experiences and needs before proceeding to satisfy the needs.

This, which may be called the Oral or Extempore system, could very soon be replaced by a book; "but," says Preceptor, "I feel sure it would be found a far more stimulative introduction to reading than could be supplied by any text-book." He adds, however, that he himself has never seen it tried except in the process of teaching the deaf and (so called) dumb to read aloud.