7 h THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Passages of English, more or less unsuited for children and often 

 selected without method, are part of existing school-drill. This might 

 be supplemented by attention to elocution, and practice in committing 

 to memory, exercises that children are peculiarly apt for. Such exer- 

 cises have the advantage of keeping the pupil occupied with the words 

 of his own language, and storing him with a fund of expression. 



Looking out the meanings is also a valuable exercise in greater or 

 less present practice. In the hands of a skilful teacher this might lead 

 to a wide command of synonymes. The highest form of this exercise 

 would be the precise discrimination of synonymes. The want of some 

 such early training is very marked in current literature. It is strange 

 that men should know, or at least have spent much of their school-time 

 in learning, the conjectured shades of meaning in Latin or Greek words, 

 while they ride rough-shod over the delicacies of their own vocabulary. 



Again, if Philology is to be studied, apart from Comparative Phi- 

 lology, it might be expected that boys should be taught the origin and 

 changes in form and meaning of words they use daily, rather than 

 crammed with the history of words they never use in after-life, and 

 never view with any thing but a pedantic interest at the best. 



A beginning might be made in philology at an early stage. The 

 sources of words are determined by simple rules : it would be an easy 

 task for beginners to apply these rules in referring words to their 

 source, to decide whether words were taken from Latin, or Saxon, or 

 Norman-French. A good exercise would be to Saxonize a whole Lat- 

 inized paragraph, and inversely. 



In discussing other studies in English I shall make a distinction 

 between analytical processes and synthetical processes. Both occur 

 in dealing with what usage permits the province of Grammar and 

 also in dealing with what, within the compass of permissible usage, 

 is best suited for its purpose the province of Rhetoric. Analysis is 

 otherwise known as construing, or parsing ; synthesis, as constructing, 

 or composing. 



In the meagi*e share of our school-time now allotted to the teach- 

 ing of English, very little is done toward the practice of these opera- 

 tions. This is all the more to be deplored, because the analysis of 

 sentences and the principles of composition are not taiight in connec- 

 tion with Latin or Greek. It is a great waste of energy to learn 

 meanings and shades of meaning of so many vocables destined' to total 

 neglect as soon as they have been learned : the evil is aggravated when 

 so much lumber is acquired without reference to principles applicable 

 to all verbal compositions. 



The grammatical analysis of sentences has lately been introduced 

 into our schools. But the complaint is made that boys, though they 

 soon learn to repeat glibly enough the hard terms used in that process, 

 often fail to understand them. Now, what is the cause of this ? It is 

 due to two causes, both arising from the consumption of so much time 



