COOPER 



ture or to the teacher of language, either, 

 since each language as a whole, and also the 

 component parts of language, words, for in- 

 stance, are hving and growing forms, and must 

 be studied as organisms. We have perhaps 

 heard too much of 'laboratory' methods in 

 the teaching of English and the hke; but none 

 of us has heard too much about the funda- 

 mental operations of observation and com- 

 parison in the study of hving forms, or of the 

 way in which great teachers have developed 

 the original powers of the student. It is simply 

 the fact that, reduced to the simplest terms, 

 there is but a single method of investigating 

 the objects of natural science and the produc- 

 tions of human genius. We study a poem, 

 the work of man's art, in the same way that 

 Agassiz made Shaler study a fish, the work of 

 God's art; the object in either case is to dis- 

 cover the relation between form or structure 

 and function or essential effect. It was no 

 chance utterance of Agassiz when he said that 

 a year or two of natural history, studied as he 

 understood it, would give the best kind of 

 training for any other sort of mental work. 

 [4] 



