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5.— THE TEACHING OF LATIN. 

 By W. A. Russell, M.A. 



The teaching of Latin in the schools and colleges of the future 

 will, in the opinion of many authorities, be directed to giving the 

 student the power of reading Latin literature with intelligence and 

 with some appreciation of the finer qualities of the language. Practice 

 in prose composition, which still occupies a large part of the student's 

 attention, will probably be more and more curtailed until it comes to 

 be simply the doing of grammatical exercises, sufficient to give the 

 needfulknoNvledge of the usages of Latin syntax. 



My purpose in the present paper is twofold. An endeavour will 

 be made to elucidate that method of teaching Latin which in my 

 opinion will lead most rapidly and certainly to the end desired, viz., 

 the reading of Latin with intelligent appreciation. At the same time 

 I shall endeavour to show — a somewhat ambitious undertaking for 

 my powers — how this method is based upon and throws light on the 

 fundamental facts and laws of human thought and its expression. 



Reading with intelligence is a phrase much used by inspectors of 

 schools. It means that the pupil follows the sense of the passage he 

 is reading, and reads it in such a natural manner that the sense is 

 clearly apprehended by the listener. A pupil may, and often doe.s, 

 read oft' each single word in the sentence correctly and yet fail to read 

 with intelligence. In what does he come short ? In this — that he has 

 not observed the relationship between the separate words. He does 

 not read them with their proper grouping. For the meaning of a 

 sentence does not flow evenly into our minds, one word after another. 

 Rather, it enters, as it has been said, by pulsations, phrase by phrase, 

 and clause by clause. Intelligent i-eading means good word-grouping. 

 When this is achieved, the mind advances from idea to idea by a kind 

 of natural logic in such a manner that the full meaning is realisefl 

 when the end of the sentence is reached. 



Tried by this criterion, very few of our scholars i-ead even easy 

 Latin with intelligence. Even after they know the meaning of a 

 sentence, they approach it as if they were uura\elling a tangled skein. 

 And yet, to appreciate the form of Latin literature, one must read the 

 language as the Romans did — that is, with a clear perception of its 

 peculiar word-grouping. 



A general name is needed for these " word groups." " Phrase " 

 and " clause " have been used already to designate some of them, but 

 there are word groups which are technically neither phrases nor clauses. 

 Indeed, a single word may constitute a unit. On the analogy of the 

 expression "algebraic term," I would suggest "logical term" as a suit- 



