practical superiority as well as the philosophic character of the phonic method of teaching to read. According to the ordinary method, spelling is an act of memory performed by the eye, which carries away an impression, more or less accurate, of the elementary forms entering into a word, and by the car, which aids the eye by recalling the order in which the names of the letters were uttered, when spelling out the word with a view to the reading of it. According to the phonic method, spelling is all this and something more; for it is an effort to disentangle into its. separate parts a complex sound, resulting from the fusion of several elements into one whole; and therefore it is an intellectual act. Bi-literal sounds are, of course, treated in the same way when spelling as when reading; and when the child comes to name the letters he will do so in such a way as to show that these sounds are simple, though denoted by two letters. "Seek" will be spelled s double e, k, and "full," ƒ, u, double l, not l, l, as is the too common practice. But it must be admitted that the mind of the child, as well as of the adult, has a tendency to run instinctively to the easiest way of overcoming a difficulty, and that spelling, consequently, becomes practically an act of eye-memory more than of intelligence. This being the case, it is remarkable that the habit of exercising infant classes in printing words on slates should have been of so recent introduction. If the eye is to remember, it can only do so by looking steadily and looking long; and it is mate

rially aided by accustoming the child to trace over on the black-board, and then to form on his own slate, the word a picture of which he is to keep in his mind for purposes of spelling. This exercise is equally helpful in teaching reading, nor is it a matter of great importance whether the child succeeds or not in delineating the forms before him. The benefit arises out of the attempt.

Notwithstanding the importance of a right method, even in the initiatory months of a child's education, it is to be admitted that the best results are, after all, invariably attained by moral means, even though these be brought into operation by a teacher regardless and unconscious of principle or plan. No one can have watched the vivacity, the playfulness, and the mental activity which some teachers can educe from their pupils, even in the apparently unsuggestive labour of alphabetic and monosyllabic instruction, without being convinced that where such qualifications can be found, all others may be dispensed with. Just as the moral purpose of the school takes precedence of every other, so does the moral vitality of the teacher supersede every other qualification, by enabling him to transfuse into the minds of his pupils a force similar to that which he himself exhibits, and which stirs and elevates the action of their understandings. Nor is this true only of the teaching of words and other initiatory knowledge; it belongs to every subject and every stage of school life. The earnest, living interest of the

master in the subjects and the objects of his work will not fail to be reflected in the minds of his pupils, and to be more fruitful in results than the most philosophical methods in the hands of the formal and half-hearted precisian.

The Juvenile Stage in teaching Reading.

Mental progress and Progress in Reading should be concurrent-Intelligent reading-To teach to read properly is to educate-The imagination and the moral and religious sensibilities of children--Intelligible reading.

The initiatory process, lasting for a year, or a year and a half, as the case may be, ends in giving the child a knowledge of reading, in the lowest technical sense. He can name, and, it may be hoped, sound the letters, and combine them into monosyllables, and into the simpler kind of dissyllables. He now knows that the groupings of forms which lie before him on a printed page are words and sentences; he knows also, in general, though within certain very narrow limits, what these words and sentences are. I have assumed that it is quite superfluous in these days to point out the necessity for a carefully graduated and well considered selection of reading-lessons, of the importance of giving the child words conveying a meaning, and only such sentences as faithfully represent, in a somewhat improved form, his own little thoughts and modes of speech. To dwell on such established points would be to waste time.

The stage of the child's progress in the art of reading, on which we next enter, is one which we

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cannot approach with too much consideration, both of our specific aims and of our means of applying them. For what does progress here mean? It means giving to the child more difficult and more numerous words to decipher, longer and more complex sentences to grasp, consecutive narrative to follow and understand. To do this would be unmeaning and futile, did we not presume a mental growth in the child corresponding to the growth of his command over written words and sentences. We presume that his daily experience, stimulated and intensified by school discipline, prompts to the acquisition of new words suited to express in oral intercourse the constant accession of new facts and fresh generalizations which observation has been from day to day forcing upon him, and which have added to the material, and through this to the capacity and power, of his understanding. If such a progress has not been going on, the pages of his book will be to the child a series of hieroglyphics, which he may be laboriously taught to pronounce, but which he not only cannot interpret, but cannot be taught to interpret. The initiatory discipline involved in acquiring the rudiments of the art of reading has, it is presumed, consolidated and methodized both the words and the thought of the opening mind, and laid a firm basis for the future structure of knowledge. If the reading-lessons of the second stage anticipate, instead of simply meeting, or, at most, slightly preceding the growth of the child, the bond up to that moment subsisting between the lesson to be

acquired and the mind acquiring is broken; the consentaneous and parallel movement of intellectual development and of progress in the technical art of reading gives place to a discord which is irreparable. The significance and interest which ought to accompany every act of knowledge disappear, and the child is doomed to a future school career essentially dreary and unprofitable. That which ought to have been at worst a labour becomes a toil. I do not say that the pupil will stop short permanently at the point at which he has been abruptly shunted off the intelligible into the unintelligible, and that all acquisition is thenceforth rendered impossible; but what he acquires will be an ineffectual knowledge of words and sentences uninspired by any meaning. One consequence of this will be that such discipline as he may receive will be so much at discord with the natural development of the mind, and made up so much of shreds and patches, that the trifling benefit which it does confer will not compensate for the aversion to all intellectual exercise which it is sure to engender.1 By inverting the intellectual order, the teacher subverts the natural love of intellectual activity. This is the result of overleaping a stage in the pupil's life, and presenting him with reading-lessons which do not truly reflect his mental growing and growth.

But this, it may be said, is a purely intellectual

1 Teachers should not ignore the fact that the proportion of the poorer classes who ever read, for the purpose of extending their information, anything save the weekly paper, is by no means large, and very far below the reasonable expectation of those who establish schools.