530 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE AND ITS EELATION 



TO THOUGHT 1 



By ALEX. HILL, M.A., M.D. 



MASTER OF DOWNING COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 



Tp OE a few years the great Samuel Johnson kept an academy for 

 -*- young gentlemen. It was not a success, despite the fact that 

 he had the two Garricks as pupils. Johnson was not fitted for the 

 work. Yet, little as Johnson succeeded as a teacher, he was himself 

 a monument of mental training — his memory colossal, his style the 

 classic for the English language, his wit so keen as to make Boswell's 

 six volumes of biography perennially good reading. If he could not 

 teach others, he had succeeded in teaching himself. We are bound to 

 give due weight to his views on his own education. To what did he 

 attribute its success? 



When Langton asked him how he had acquired so accurate a knowl- 

 edge of Greek and Latin, ' the Doctor ' replied : " My master whipped 

 me very well ; without that, sir, I should have done nothing." " I 

 would rather have the rod a general terror to all to make them learn 

 than tell a child : ' If you do thus or thus, you will be esteemed above 

 your brothers and sisters.' The rod produces an effect which termi- 

 nates in itself, whereas by exciting emulation and comparisons of 

 superiority you lay the foundations of lasting mischief." The rod was 

 Johnson's instrument of education. What were his materials? What 

 subject did he consider as the most suitable vehicles of education? A 

 single illustration will reveal his whole mind. 



Writing to a young friend who had asked his advice as to the 

 best subjects for him to study before entering the university — he must 

 have been a lad of fifteen or sixteen years old — Johnson says : " I know 

 not well what books to direct you to because you have not informed me 

 what study you will apply yourself to. I think it will be best for you 

 to apply yourself wholly to the languages until you go to the uni- 

 versity. The Greek authors I recommend you to read are these : Cebes, 

 iElian, Lucian, Xenophon, Homer, Theocritus, Euripides. Thus you 

 will be tolerably skilled in the dialects, beginning with Attic, to which 

 the rest must be referred." Then follows a still more appalling list 

 of Latin writers. Johnson " does not know the study to which his 

 young friend intends to apply himself." But, whatever his destined 



1 Presidential address to the Teachers' Guild of Great Britain and Ireland, 

 delivered at University College, London, May 22, 1906. 



