given locality are the earliest to be acquired, while the rarer ones are later. This order may in teaching generally be assumed as a natural one, e.g., apples first and wheat last. This order, however, varies very greatly with every change of environment, so that the results of exploration of children's minds in one place cannot be assumed to be valid for those of another, save within comparatively few concept-spheres."

Words as Vehicles of Thought.

Gregory says: "Language is the vehicle of thought, but it does not convey thought as a wagon carries goods. It conveys them rather as wires do telegrams, signals to the receiving operator. Words bring ideas, and if the ideas be incomprehensible, owing to lack of previous knowledge, want of 'an apperceptive basis,' then words, as such, are futile. Words are loved or hated for the ideas that they suggest. Words are loaded with false, spurious meanings, social colorings, untrue conceptions due to circumstances or surroundings of usage with which they were the first time connected. Words, rightly used, are clue-lines, signs of real thought and intelligence. Words belong in certain groups or families, and are better learned and used, if so systematized and grouped by the teacher and pupil. Much of our conversation and teaching is padded with unnecessary, meaningless, useless words. There is a skill in being concise and to the point. It is not the mark of intelligence to become verbose in an outpouring flood of words, often to no purpose and no end."

Drawbridge adds: "Every wise teacher knows well enough that mere words, whether learned from the Bible or from the Catechism, are mere words. Ideas are different things altogether. Words have no value whatever apart from ideas. If words mean nothing to the child, they are worth nothing to him. It is of course obvious to anyone who knows anything about the subject that all Catechisms, as they are often taught, are almost wholly useless to the child. But when such is the case, the fault is not in the Catechisms, nor in the children, but in the teacher. Words are counters, which are useful only in so far as they represent ideas. A word is not an idea. Θεος is no more than a word to those who do not know Greek, and it needs

more than a knowledge of Greek in order to understand the idea of 'God,' which the word Theos is intended to convey. Words are words. Ideas are ideas. To teach a word is one thing. To teach an idea is quite another thing.

"What is true of one word, is no less true of a collection of words. A string of words is not the same thing as a series of thoughts. To be able to repeat all the words of the Catechism is not necessarily to understand a single one of the ideas which it is intended to convey. To teach words is quite a different thing from imparting ideas.

"A book (which is made up of words) is of no use to anyone, unless the words of which it is composed become thoughts by means of the process of intelligent study. If I buy a book, and keep it by me, I have acquired no new ideas, unless I read the book. I may have a vast library, but its contents remain mere words, unless I enrich my soul with thoughts by means of study.

"Hence the absurdity of teaching words without ideas. Words are like paper money; their value depends on what they stand for. As you would be none the richer for possessing Confederate money to the amount of a million dollars, so your pupils would be none the wiser for being able to repeat book after book by heart unless the words were the signs of ideas in their minds. Words without ideas are an irredeemable paper currency.

"It is the practical recognition of the truth that the blind use of words is the fundamental error that has revolutionized the best schools of the country in the last quarter of a century. Pestalozzi well called the blind use of words in matters of instruction, the 'fundamental error.' He was not the first educational reformer who insisted on it. Montaigne, Comenius, Locke, Rousseau, had all insisted on the same idea, but they were in advance of their time; the world was not ready to listen to them. But in 1806, after Prussia was thoroughly beaten by Napoleon at the battle of Jena; when her capital city was in the hands of her conqueror, and she lay humiliated at his feet, it occurred to some of her leading men that the regeneration of the nation was to be sought in education. In this way it happened that the ideas of Pestalozzi were embodied in the schools of

Germany, whence they have gone into the schools of every civilized country in the world."

IN THE SEVEN LAWS OF TEACHING, Gregory says: "Words are not the only medium through which mind speaks to mind. The thinker has a hundred ways to express his thoughts. The eye talks with a varied eloquence; and the skilled orator finds in lip and brow, in head and hand, in the shrugging shoulder and the stamping foot, organs for most intelligible speech. The gestures of John B. Gough often told more than the clearest sentences of other speakers. A German described him as 'the man what talks mit his coat-tails,' referring to some illustration in which the facile orator had made a flirt of his coat-tails to tell the idea he wished to express. Among savage people whose language is too meagre to meet the native needs of their minds, symbolic action supplies the lack of words. There is also speech in pictures. From the rudest chalk sketch on the blackboard to the highest work of the painter's art, no teaching is more swift and impressive than that of pictorial representation. The eye gathers here at a glance more than the ear could learn from an hour of verbal description.

"The misuse of language is perhaps one of the most common failures in teaching. Not to mention those pretended teachers who cover up their own ignorance or indolence with a cloud of verbiage which they know the children will not understand, and omitting also those who are more anxious to exhibit their own wisdom than to convey knowledge to others, we find still some honest teachers who labor hard to make the lesson clear, and then feel that their duty is done. If the children do not understand, it must be from hopeless stupidity or from wilful inattention. They do not suspect that they have used words which have no meaning to the class or to which the children give a meaning differing from the teacher's. I once heard a legislator, who was also a preacher, in addressing the pupils of a reform school on the parable of the Prodigal Son, ask the question: 'Boys, are you of the opinion that the customary aliments of swine are adapted to the digestive apparatus of the genus homo?' An interrogative grunt was the only reply."

The Child's Vocabulary.

Regarding the above, Haslett states: "The child of poor

parents understands fewer words but more actions, while the child of wealthy parents understands more words but fewer actions. The influence of the environment causes the variations. During the early childhood stage, children are more interested in the names and general form of things. In the next stage, the nature, the make-up of things and their uses become central. Nouns form sixty per cent. of a child's vocabulary; verbs twenty per cent., adjectives nine, adverbs five, and pronouns two per cent.

"The vocabulary of a child two years old was 263 words; another child twenty-eight months old used 677 words; another thirty months old made use of 327 words. A child thirty-two months old had 642 words in his vocabulary and when five and one-half years old there were 1,500 words that he used, exclusive of participles and inflected forms. A child seven years of age uses probably 2,500, and one eight to ten years old uses on the average 3,000 to 4,000 words, judging from the reading. The English Bible contains about 7,000 words exclusive of proper Robinson Crusoe, a book so much read by children from ten to fourteen years of age, has nearly 6,000 words. Thus it would appear that a child's vocabulary is rich. Nouns and verbs being in the majority, suggests much as to the character of stories suitable for this stage and the nature of the instruction."

names.

Henry Clay Trumbull tells of an intelligent Sunday School teacher who proceeded on the assumption that the members of the class understood the meaning of the "passion" as applied to the sufferings of Christ, and whose method of teaching was revolutionized by the discovery that they had no conception of the word. The teacher should study the vocabulary of his student. This may be done by inducing the student to express himself and carefully observing his choice of words. It has been said that of the one hundred thousand words in the English language, few men understand more than twenty thousand, and the vocabulary of a child of ten rarely contains more than fifteen hundred. The folly of taking for granted that the student understands the language of the lesson at every point, therefore, is very apparent.

Referring to Professor Adams' PRIMER, he says: "New and

difficult words are recognized as stumbling-blocks, and are usually carefully explained. But the real difficulty of communication arises, not so much from hard words as from every-day, commonplace words that children are supposed to know perfectly. The offices that our Lord executes as our Redeemer are described as those of prophet, priest, and king. In dealing with these, many teachers would agree with one who began his explanation thus: 'All know what a king is, so I needn't trouble you with that, but priest is harder to understand, while the big word prophet is the hardest of all.' As a matter of experience, a set of careful examinations of children of various ages brought out the fact that of the three words, king was the most troublesome and prophet the easiest. This comes about because children have no ideas about prophet except those they learned in connection with sacred things. About king, on the contrary, they have all sorts of popular notions, from the rubicund, jolly monarch of the fairy tale up to the latest picture of the reigning sovereign. Indeed, in the case of young children, we have here an excellent example of the arrest of contrary ideas. Many of them found it impossible to think of our Lord as at once. prophet, priest, and king. As king, He was pictured as a grand man with a crimson cloak and a gold crown; as priest, He appeared as an emaciated, pale-faced man with a long black coat and a soft hat; as prophet He rose before their minds as an aged man with a long staff, a loose gown, and an uncovered head. Naturally these pictures could not be fused, nor could they be placed side by side so as to form a composite, since there is but one Redeemer. They were contrary ideas, and therefore arrested each other. Thought became impossible. What the teacher must do under such circumstances is to separate in each case that quality that is essential to his purpose, and show that this quality is not inconsistent with the other qualities similarly separated. It is a mistake, however, to seek to explain every difficult word as you use it. This leads to a sort of running translation, which cannot fail to be irksome and confusing. Thus in dealing with the Tenth Commandment we should carefully explain the meaning of covet and neighbor (and even envy, though that word does not occur in the text at all) because each of these may be misunderstood. But we do not require to explain the exact mean