642 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



hand and long-hand, perhaps, than any hoy of his age (eleven years) in 

 the kingdom ; and no one I dare say has had less to do with that ab- 

 surdity of absurdities, the spelling-book ! He is now at a first-rate 

 school in Wiltshire, and in the half-year preceding Christmas he car- 

 ried off the prize for orthography in a contest with boys, some of 

 them his senior by years ! " 



Mrs. E. B. Burnz, of New York, says, in regard to her experience 

 at Nashville, soon after the civil war : " The phonetic teaching in the 

 Fisk School, as elsewhere, proved beyond all cavil that with phonetic 

 books as much could be accomplished in four months in teaching to 

 read as by a year with the common method. And, moreover, it showed 

 that there is no difficulty experienced by children in passing from the 

 phonetic to the ordinary printed books. After going through the 

 phonetic primer and First and Second Reader, the children passed at 

 once into the Second Reader in common print, and from the phonetic 

 Gospel into the common New Testament." Successful experiments in 

 common schools are on record in sufficient numbers to prove the prac- 

 ticability of the method. 



Several phonetic primers have been published and are used in 

 some American and English schools, for teaching English in the schools 

 of Paris, and by missionaries among the Indians and other peoples. 

 With one of these books, parents will find it a light task to teach 

 their children to read at home in a few lessons. Since there are only 

 twenty-six (or, counting m and oe, twenty-eight) letters in our alpha- 

 bet, while for phonetic printing means of representing forty sounds 

 are needed, each of these books uses an extended form of the alphabet. 

 Unfortunately, no one alphabet for the phonetic printing of English 

 has yet been agreed upon ; still, any of these systems can be adopted 

 for the schools of a city or town, with the certainty of good results. 

 The alphabet devised by the American Philological Association may 

 be said to be the most authoritative ; it has also the merit of employ- 

 ing only three new letters. I am not unaware of the efforts being 

 made to replace the current spelling by a phonetic system for all pur- 

 poses, but that is a matter quite distinct from the subject of this arti- 

 cle ; and all who believe that the orderly and vigorous development of 

 the mental faculties should be the chief end in education, whether 

 they favor or oppose the spelling reform, can work together for the 

 spread of the phonetic method of teaching reading. 



