April 15, 1887.] 



SCIEJSTCE, 



377 



Schliemann, Hermann, and the officers of our 

 army, while the most ardent friends of the 

 gymnasium have never been able to consider Bis- 

 marck's inclinations favorable to this system of 

 education. 



David Friedrich Strauss, a philologist of a very 

 high order, the embodiment of the critico-philo- 

 sophical method, a master of both poetry and 

 prose, who, like Luther, took a firm hold upon our 

 nation, was a general without an army. The 

 mighty thinker lives forgotten and unknown. 

 In the evening of his life the meteoric splendor of 

 his name brightens the world once again. In his 

 * Old faith and new ' he falls without judgment or 

 method upon the newly risen star of Darwinism 

 to extinguish it. His classical education remained 

 narrow and partial, so that he lacked the organ 

 for comprehending and justly judging a theory of 

 natural science. 



This will be sufficient to create a desire to read 

 the pamphlet. The reqviirements in supplemen- 

 tary examination in Greek and Latin demanded 

 from the graduate of the real-gymnasium in Prus- 

 sia since 1882 are severe, and perhaps too difficult 

 for a man of ordinary talents ; still it is to be 

 hoped that they will be partially or entirely set 

 aside when among us also the hard and bitter fight 

 ■concerning authority gives place to a more judicial 

 state of mind, and the government of the schools 

 shall show greater signs of shifting their ground. 



MODERN METHODS FOB BEGINNERS IN 

 LATIN. 



The boy of the present day has no idea of the 

 advantage he enjoys over the boy of the last gen- 

 eration in respect to ways and means of attaining 

 a knowledge of the ancient languages. No drea- 

 rier memory haunts the mind of the writer than 

 that of the twenty months or more in his youth 

 devoted to the acquisition of Latin accidence. 

 The theory of his instructors was that the prom- 

 ised land of actual Latin literature was only to be 

 entered after the full tale of disciplinary wander- 

 ings through, the woful deserts of declensions and 

 conjugations and rules and exceptions, and, above 

 all, the dismal wastes of the manufactured Latin 

 in which Dr. Arnold has embalmed the virtues 

 and vices and miscellaneous sentiments of Balbus. 

 It is painful to think how amazed the well- 

 meaning instructors of that day would have been 

 at the very name of the little book which is now 

 so deservedly popular, ' Six weeks' preparation 

 for reading Caesar.' Yet this name very accu- 

 rately illustrates the prevailing tendency in pre- 



Latin word-building. By Charles O. Gates, A.M. New 

 'York, Appleton. 24°. 



paratory work. It is becoming an established 

 principle with thoughtful teachers that no more 

 in Latin than in English is parrot-like ability to 

 repeat avast number of grammatical forms and 

 rules an indispensable prerequisite to the reading 

 of an interesting narrative written in a simple 

 style. The mediaeval idea that grammar as an 

 abstract science is well adapted to the develop- 

 ment of immature minds has at last succumbed 

 to the stubborn resistance with which such minds 

 have instinctively met all attempts at such devel- 

 opment. How many teachers who have ever 

 undertaken to pursue the old plan in respect to 

 grammar, whether of the vernacular or of foreign 

 languages, can recall a single pupil who did not 

 pronounce the subject ' awfully dry ' ? Such a 

 case is as rare as the juvenile prodigy that pro- 

 fesses really to like the old-fashioned arithmetical 

 cube root. But in the skilful evolution of a 

 grammatical principle out of some striking pas- 

 sage of Irving or Caesar, what boy will not find 

 interest ? 



For the tyro, as for the scholar, the true and 

 natural method of mastering the logic of a lan- 

 guage is to seek it in the literature of the language. 

 The consciousness of this truth is the basis of the 

 modern tendency to get the beginner in Latin 

 into immediate contact with Caesar as soon as 

 possible. There is some lagging yet among the 

 older generation of instructors as well as among 

 the less energetic. It requires more labor on the 

 teacher's part to so employ the new method than 

 to cling to the old. Equipping a boy with gram- 

 mar and reader, and seeing that he memorizes a 

 certain amount each day, constitutes the bulk of 

 the teacher's work under the antiquated system. 

 But to secure to the pupil in three months such 

 familiarity with the forms and meanings of words 

 and the leading principles of syntax as shall 

 prove an efficient armory in the attack on ccn- 

 nected prose, demands a degree of discriminating 

 and intelligent care that is to be found only in the 

 really capable instructor. For the presentation of 

 the forms and syntactical principles necessaiy 

 under the new plan, a large number of excellent 

 text-books have already been offered to the public. 

 It has been left to the thoroughly competent in 

 structor of the Adelphi academy of Brooklyn to 

 furnish a handbook of great value in the acquisi- 

 tion of a vocabulary of Caesarian and Ciceronian 

 words. The basis of the plan presented in ' Latin 

 word-building ' is the belief that the aptitude of 

 the juvenile mind for the detections of resem- 

 blances in the orthography and sou»d of words 

 is the most useful quality to employ in the forma- 

 tion of a vocabulary. Accordingly, Mr. Gates 

 has collected in alphabetical order the root-words 



