176 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



month goes on increasing. He 



detects the distinction in sounds, and after a time he expresses his ideas — not 



sums 



soul with the outer world the mind receives ever increasing supplies of 

 knowledge which it assimilates according to its capacity. 



Before the child is five years old he can describe his perceptions, he can 

 find his way about in his own neighbourhood ; he connects events in their 

 order, as when he looks for the people when he hears the church bell, or for 

 the train when he hears the whistle of the engine. He knows and classifies 

 trees and plants and animals. He will, even of his own accord, give a name to 

 any object with which he often meets. In fact he displays a mind in full 

 working order, with reason and memory ever active. In his own little sphere 

 his conceptions agree in outline with the order of nature, coloured with all the 

 charms of the partly unknown — the mind is of its own accord ascending the 

 hill of Parnassus by a very delightful path . 



At this age he is usually entrusted to a teacher to quicken his perceptions 

 and to enlarge his ideas. The teacher at once puts our pupil to learn the 

 twenty-six letters of the alphabet. The child is then shown the nine dibits 

 and zero ; and then repeats perhaps a few lines of his catechism. In fact the 

 child's mind, which has been up to this time chiefly occupied with its own 

 perceptions, with the colours of the flowers and the song of the birds, is at once 

 compelled to grapple with the most abstract ideas. The change is as great as 

 if a man were suddenly transported from an Auckland summer to a Siberian 

 winter. It is quite impossible for the mind of the child to assimilate these 

 admirable abstractions. 



We may associate the letters and figures with the advance of the human 

 race in civilisation ; we may know what a great advantage has been gained 

 by adopting the Arabic symbols, and how superior they are to the clumsy 

 symbols employed by the Greeks and Romans in their mathematical calcula- 

 tions. But to a child they have no association and no history. 



The letters also have a long history ; they can be traced back to the picture 

 writing of men emerging from a savage condition. This kind of writing a 

 child understands without a teacher, and long before he is sent to school he 

 can read pictures. It appears then that from this point his instruction should 

 naturally begin. Let him be shown the picture of an object, together with 

 the word for the object, and action and reaction of ideas is at once aroused, 



ith the object, so that very quickly he 



and the word becomes associated v 

 reads the word without the picture. 



be 



pictures, as well as the agent and its action which will convey the meaning 

 of the written sentence. In this way the learner connects the known with 



