AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. 471 



study of the arts of expression, which is equivalent to the study of 

 literature, rhetoric, and style, was reserved until after many years of 

 study of things should have accumulated impressions and ideas which 

 spontaneously sought an outlet. Further, the child was taught to 

 draw in simple combinations of lines for many months before attempt- 

 ing to write. When this difficult and complex muscular exercise was 

 approached, she began it with unusual ease, and in a few weeks, at the 

 age of six, already commanded a firm and legible handwriting. Fur- 

 ther, and for the same purpose, no set copy-book was used from which 

 meaningless sentences could be imitated ; but the child proceeded at 

 once to utilize the art of writing in precisely the same way that hu- 

 manity has done in passing from barbarism with spoken traditions, to 

 civilization with a recorded history. She recorded at first with printed, 

 afterward with script characters, the history of a group of hyacinths, 

 whose development she watched from birth to death. The writing, 

 though compelled to be carefully done, was recognized as no end in 

 itself, but as a means to preserve a connected history of a series of 

 interesting events, otherwise liable to lapse into oblivion. The art 

 was thus approached as all arts should be, from the stand-point of its 

 real genesis, and tended to place itself in the same relative position in 

 the child's mind that it had occupied in the real history of the world. 



Study of the pathological conditions of writer's cramp, and of the 

 numerous brain-lesions which have so marvelously dissected the fac- 

 ulty of comprehending verbal and written signs, has revealed a hith- 

 erto unsuspected complexity in the muscular movements involved in 

 writing, and of the mental processes necessary to language.* The 

 discovery has not yet modified the glaring crudity of the educational 

 methods which persist in beginning mental training with a forced drill 

 in these complex processes and gymnastics. 



Not speech abstractions, the highest conquest of the mind, but the 

 development of the visual conceptions, which are its earliest sponta- 

 neous achievement, should be the first object of systematic training. 

 Forms and colors are the elements of all visual impressions ; and these 

 are, moreover, susceptible of a scientific classification which can, from 

 the beginning, be rendered appreciable to the child. It is upon forms 

 and colors, therefore, that both perception and memory must first be 

 exercised. The visual impression should be amplified up to the point 

 at which it is able to fix itself on the mind by its own momentum ; 

 therefore, without conscious effort. When the mind has accumulated 

 a stock of reminiscences which can not be forgotten, it will, by so 

 much, have enriched its structure and enlarged its furniture. It is 

 then prepared for voluntary efforts at recollection. 



The amplification of the impression is effected in two ways : 1. The 

 impression may be associated with an action on the part of the child, 



* See Kussmaul, " Stoerungen der Sprache " ; also, Lichtheim on " Aphasia " (" Brain," 

 January, 1885). The literature on these two subjects is already immense. 



