CHAPTER IX.

READING is a process by which, at a glance, the mind acquires a knowledge of events, past, present, and future. It is thus a condensed mode of gaining knowledge, and being necessarily complicated, requires much time and practice to become available for that purpose. It is looking at nature through a symbolical medium, but unlike hieroglyphical symbols, in which objects and ideas were delineated and conveyed to the mind by the sense of sight, the connexion between language and objects must be traced mentally. Certain marks, or groups of marks, represent particular sounds, which again signalise certain ideas, or mental pictures of nature. These sounds and words have a merely arbitrary value, and, like the paper currency of a country, are of no use unless sanctioned by authority and representing something of intrinsic worth. To read is, therefore, to look at things through the names of their images, by which the mind obtains a secondary reflection merely, and a very faint miniature of nature; and if it can thus obtain a greater number of ideas in a smaller compass than from a hieroglyphical book, these are necessarily much more obscure individually.

The eyes of the understanding must, therefore, be prepared for the task by a maturity of development, and trained to it by much practice. The initiating into

this process also presumes upon a capacity for retaining and comprehending those ideas of which the names are given. These words or names should serve the mind as an index to its knowledge, but unless associated with the correct ideas, they will only darken the judgment; or if not clearly connected with any ideas, they are of no more practical use, in a mental point of view, than a forged note or a false picture. To read without understanding the meaning, is an act of sensation merely, in which the eye informs the ear how certain marks should be sounded, and is a similar process to reading music from notes. Scarcely any mental exertion takes place in this operation, and no benefit is derived beyond gaining possession of an instrument whose uses have yet to be learned. As by a little practice any one may read Greek fluently, and not understand a word of it, so may a child learn to pronounce all the words in English without receiving any ideas from them, there being no necessary connexion between the one and the other. The Greek reader must appeal to a lexicon for his ideas, and combining these with his Greek terms, thus render these latter vehicles filled with thought, whereas before, they were to him mere empty sounds. And the English student must follow a similar course; he must look into his words to see what they contain, otherwise they will only serve as an indication how to enunciate certain vocal sounds, just as the musician is guided by the disposition of crotchet. and quaver in the modulation of his tones and the timing of his song. Ideas should, therefore, be communicated simultaneously, or rather antecedently to their names, both oral and written.

Again, words are combinations of elementary sounds, the marks or letters representing which are equally arbitrary, and even of these letters the greater part, namely,

consonants, are also the marks of combined sounds. The voices, or vowels, are the only true elementary sounds, and of these only three, a, e, o, are purely unmixed. These latter require but one conformation of the vocal organs to pronounce them, and no motion in the organs; the other vowels require a double conformation, and are, in fact, a sort of diphthong, requiring two half sounds to make them up, and so on through all the consonants. It is evident that no description of these sounds can convey a just notion to the ear, how they should be enunciated, neither do the names of the characters representing them afford much indication of this. The living voice must pitch the note, and, as far as possible, in doing so the external organs of speech be exhibited in action. These must be imitated and re-echoed by the pupil before he be able to articulate the same sound. This done, the next step is to present to the eye the mark of that sound upon a black board, and to establish a connexion in the mind between them, so that, on the re-appearance of the same mark in future, the eye may inform the ear what particular sound is to be enunciated.

As many letters in the English tongue, however, have several sounds, a difficulty occurs in remembering this distinction, which obtains as much between the different sounds of the same letter as between different letters, and which can only properly be overcome by practice when letters are being formed into words. When all the elementary sounds have been thus acquired and remembered, the synthetic process commences, and two or more sounds are agglutinated into one, forming a monosyllable, which should also be presented to the eye.

By this time the pupil, if he remember the separate sounds of each letter, will be able to combine them him

self and pronounce the word. If this word be the name of anything unknown to the pupil, a higher process should now take place, the object, or a diagram of it, should be exhibited, and a connexion established between the name and the thing. Thus, an object and its written name being seen together and associated in the mind, an idea of the former will afterwards be called up by seeing its name, or the name by seeing the object. A parallel course to this is to make the pupil write or trace the letter himself on a slate after he has seen it on the black board, and there is nothing to prevent all these operations going on at the same time, and almost in the same lesson, namely, reading, writing, and gaining new ideas.

This way of teaching the alphabet by the sound or powers of the letters rather than by their names, is called the phonic method, and is coming into very general practice in the best schools. In those of the continent it has been long in operation, and within the last few years Dr. Kay Shuttleworth has been the means of introducing it into England, where a trial was first made of it in his training school at Battersea. It is strictly a mental and training exercise, and proceeding upon a principle of nature. To teach the alphabet by the names of the letters, and thence to attempt to form words out of them, requires a constant system of telling, because there is often no connexion between such names and the sounds wanted. Suppose a child knew the names of a and of b, and were requested to join them by the process mentioned, what could he say, but that it was a, b, or, perhaps, abe, he would never think of pronouncing it ab. Whereas, if he knew the power of a, and of b, the very enunciating of each letter consecutively, would give the true pronunciation of the monosyllable. Or were he asked to join e and 7 from their names, he would, of, course, call it eel,

and without giving any reason, the master would correct him by simply telling the right sound.

Children who are taught to read on this now antiquated mode derive very little assistance from knowing the names of their letters. It is even possible to teach a clever boy to read before he knows one-half of their names. After learning the alphabet, too, almost every succeeding syllable must be sounded and every lesson told to them. Their progress, therefore, depends entirely upon a process of memory in recalling the sounds of whole words as they have been told them, and not in any acquired power of analysing and recombining their elementary sounds. Every new word is acquired in the same way as an individual letter, and the whole language learned like the entire alphabet, by repeated efforts of memory. Again, when the process is reversed, and an attempt made to analyse words into the names of their letters, or simply to spell vocally, no assistance is gained from the entire sound of the word to discover its individual letters. For example, what phonic connexion is there between the word house and the names of the following letters-h o use? When, therefore, a child is asked to spell a word in this way, he never thinks how its letters sound, but the sound of the word recalls to his mind a picture of its appearance as seen in the book, and according to the vividness of his recollection will he spell it correctly or otherwise.

Hence the enormous drudgery to which poor children are often subjected in what is miscalled "learning to spell," a labour without the slightest possible benefit, either as an auxiliary in learning to read or to spell. The use of spelling is not to learn to read, but to copy reading or to convert it into writing, and in this process no sounds are required. It is simply an act of memory recalling the forms of words and the order of their letters, and

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