that these hard words mean nothing more than lip, teeth, throat, and nose sounds. No attempt, however, appears to have been made at the Sessional school, to remove the tedium invariably connected with this branch of instruction; unless, indeed, an artificial exhibition of the twenty-six letters on a box, contrived by the late Dr. Andrew Thompson, for the use of his own parish school, can be thus designated.

Professor Pillans, in some lectures which he delivered in the year 1827, on the theory and practice of teaching, proposes, on the contrary, to arrange the alphabetic characters in brotherhoods, according to the organs of voice used in pronouncing them; and to teach the child the knowledge of his letters at first, and for a long time, in this way only.

"We should thus avoid," he says, "the greatest difficulty the child encounters in learning the alphabet, that of recollecting the sequence or arrangement of the letters. The order of their succession in our common alphabet is entirely capricious, and appears, indeed, to be purely accidental; and a knowledge of it, so far from being indispensable at the outset, is at that stage altogether useless for any practical purpose. Yet, in the ordinary way, the child is arrested, and unseasonably detained in the very porch of learning, by being compelled to name, and not to name only, but to learn by heart, a series of letters, which have not one associating tie to bind them in the memory, but juxta-position. It

is stringing beads, as it were, on a thread of sand. It may be well he should know this alphabetic arrangement when he comes to consult a dictionary; but I really cannot see its use for any other purpose. On the other hand, by the classification of letters in their cognate relations, the acquisition of them may be made an amusing exercise. The attention of the child being drawn to the organs of voice employed in each set, he makes experiments upon them, in imitating the sounds he hears, and has thus a guide to the pronunciation of each letter, which greatly facilitates his acquaintance with their form and power."*

Jacotot, to whose principles and methods I shall hereafter have occasion to refer, meets the diffiulty in by far the best manner; he gets rid of alphabetic teaching altogether, and introduces the pupil, from the first, to a knowledge of words. At the Borough Road school, the principle of dispensing with alphabetic teaching has long been adopted : the alphabet class has merged in that of children in two letters; and all unmeaning combinations have been utterly excluded. The advantage is obvious. If the word "me," "in," or "to," for instance, be mentioned, the child recognizes a familiar sound, and judging by the ear, he almost instinctively answers, m-e, to the question, "Can you spell the word me?" If, after having men

*Pillans' Letters to Kennedy.

"The Mother's Primer, by T. H. Gallaudet," now in use in the primary schools in Boston, teaches words before letters.

tioned the word, the monitor tells him to point on the lesson to the letters which compose it, his curiosity is excited, and the gratification attendant on a successful effort, excites a desire to encounter new difficulties.*

SPELLING. We learn to spell, chiefly, if not exclusively, in order that we may be able to write correctly; that method, therefore, which will most speedily and effectually enable us to carry the relative situations of the letters in the mind, so that whenever we wish to express our thoughts on paper, we can do so without misplacing them, is certainly the best. Now, as writing a word is a slower operation than orally spelling it; and as the mind is obliged in that exercise to dwell longer on the relative situation of every letter, than it is in mere pronunciation, the orthography of the word

* The absurdity of teaching the letters of the alphabet by their arbitrary names, in place of their sounds, has long been felt in France and Germany. We tell a child to say pe-aýtch-wi-es-i-see, and then call upon him to pronounce it. What would he conclude, if he reasoned, but that it must be peaytchwiesisee, and by what magic can he learn that it should be pronounced fizik! A striking illustration of this occurred in a school which I visited. Two bright children of six years of age, could repeat every letter of a word at sight, and then would look up, with an innocent, inquiring face, to their teacher, unable to divine how this cabalistic combination of sounds should be pronounced together, until he repeated the word. It seems they had formerly been guided by the pictures of the objects annexed to the words, and had pronounced the name as they had learned to speak it. But, the perfect knowledge of the letters afforded no clue to the sound of the word.-Woodbridge.

must be more deeply impressed on the memory by writing, than it can be in any other way. When, therefore, the learner has become able to write, this mode of teaching him to spell should by no means be neglected.

"Reading should invariably precede spelling. I do not mean that the child should be kept a long time in learning to read, before he commences spelling; but that he should never be set to spell a word until he has first become able readily to read it. The reason is, that reading is much easier than spelling, and that a person cannot spell by thinking how a word sounds, but he must recollect how it looks. The eye, therefore, as well as the ear, must become familiar with a word, before it can readily be spelled. One thing that renders reading easier than spelling, is, that perception is more vivid and distinct than conception. Hence it is easier to distinguish two similar words, as cat and rat, or eat and tea, when the eye is fixed upon them in reading, than it is to recollect the difference in their orthography, when they are absent from the eye."*

These judicious remarks coincide in the main, with the substance of a lecture upon this branch of tuition, delivered by another practical teacher, before the convention of teachers, assembled to form the American Institute of Instruction in 1830. Both agree that the words to be spelled should first be embodied in reading lessons, and

* Parkhurst.

afterwards arranged in columns; and both insist that the evidence of their being possessed by the pupil should in all cases be rendered in writing. On this point the lecturer justly observes,—

"In all branches susceptible of it, the exercises, the results of study, should be presented to the eye, as the best organ of communication with the mind. Whatever is acquired through this medium, is better retained than when entering through any other. It may be said, the eye remembers. It is more attentive than the ear. Its objects are not confused. It takes in a single and perfect image of what is placed before it, and transfers the picture to the mind. Hence all illustrations in our teaching which can possibly be addressed to this organ, should be so applied."*

The plan pursued at the model-school in the Borough Road, which plan is fully explained in the Manual of the society, is perhaps the best that can be devised.

"The spelling lessons, which are printed in both roman and italic type, to exercise the children in reading various characters, exhibit a two-fold arrangement. The names of things are arranged under various heads, such as trades, measures, vegetables, quadrupeds, clothing, fruit, medicine, flowers, birds, &c.; and columns

*

Thayer. Since the above was written, this lecture and several others of a similar character, delivered in the United States, have been reprinted in London, under the title of "the Schoolmaster," 2 vols. Knight, Ludgate Hill.