5 PHYSIOLOGICAL NOTES ON PRIMARY EDUCATION STUDY OF LANGUAGE MARY PUTNAM JACOBI, M.D. NEW YORK AND LONDON G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS &Ije finickerbochtr |Jras 1889 COPYRIGHT BY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 1889 Press of G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS New York CONTENTS. PAGE AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION i AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION (Continued} . 23 THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF ...... 41 THE PLACE FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE IN A CUR- RICULUM OF EDUCATION . 62 NOTES ON PRIMARY EDUCATION AND LANGUAGE. I. AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. In modern times education has been recognized to be something more than an elegant luxury, designed exclusively for the benefit of the " upper classes." It is a force, and a potent and indisputable means, not only for the training but for the evocation of forces. It is able, not only to convey information, but to in- crease power. It is not simply a social convention, but a real means for attaining real ends. The final ends of education are efficiency and repose. The educated person is he who knows how to get what he wants, and how to enjoy it when he has got it. When a " higher education " is demanded, for any class of persons as women, it means that it has become desirable to train their faculties for more difficult work than that traditionally assigned to them, and also that it is desirable to enable them to get more enjoyment out of any work that they do. The necessary correlative of the possession of powers is the opportunity for their exercise. The existence 2 AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. of a larger class of effectively educated women must increase their demand for a larger share in that part of the world's work which requires trained intelli- gence. Of this, literature and other art is one and only one portion. The work of the professions, of the upper regions of industry, commerce, and finance, the work of scientific and of political life, is the work appropriate to the intelligences which have proved themselves equal to a course of training at once complex and severe. A person destined to re- ceive a superior education is expected to develop more vigorous mental force, to have a larger mental horizon, to handle more complex masses of ideas, than another. From the beginning, therefore, he must not merely receive useful information, but be habituated to perform difficult mental operations, for only in this way can the sum of mental power be increased. The order, arrangement, and sequence of the ideas he acquires must be as carefully planned as is the selec- tion of the ideas themselves, because upon this order and internal proportion his mental horizon depends. The child must be trained in feats of sustained atten- tion, and in the collocation and association of element- ary ideas into complex combinations. Since ideas are abstractions from sense-perceptions, he must be exer- cised in the acquisition of accurate, rapid, far-reaching, and delicate sense-perceptions, in their memorization, and in the representative imagination which may re- call them at will, and be able to abstract from them, more or less remotely, ideas. Habits of rich associa AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. 3 tion of ideas must be formed, and of pleasure in their contemplation. And very early must be offered to the child problems to be solved, either by purely mental exertion, or by that combined with manual labor. And all this care must be taken for girls as well as for boys, so soon as it is seriously agreed that girls may be admitted to a superior as well as to a primary education. The first intellectual faculties to be trained are perception and memory. The subjects of the child's first studies should therefore be selected, not on ac- count of their ultimate utility, but on account of their influence upon the development of these faculties. What sense is there, then, in beginning education with instruction in the arts of reading and writing ? If literature were the main business of life, or if, as was at one time supposed, education meant nothing else but acquaintance with literature, there would be some logic in the extraordinary prominence habitual- ly assigned in education to the study of modes of literary expression. But, from the modern stand- point, that education means such an unfolding of the faculties as shall put the mind into the widest and most effective relation with the entire world of things spiritual and material, there is an exquisite absurdity in the time-honored method. To study words before things tends to impress the mind with a fatal belief in their superior importance. To study expression before subjects of thought have been ac- cumulated, is to cultivate the habit, always prevalent 4 AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. in civilized life, of talking fluently without having any thing to say. To direct attention to sets of arbi- trary signs before attention has been trained by con- templation of real objects, teaches the mind to place conventional and contingent facts on the same level with necessary truths. We thus weaken in advance the power of belief in necessity and reality. With- out such power the mind becomes inevitably the prey to a skepticism generated much less by contra- dictions in the outside world, than by the weakness of its internal organism. What other result should logically be produced, when, to the opening mind, as it turns eagerly to the wonderful world in which it awakens and finds itself, we offer for contemplation, exercise, and earliest sustenance, the alphabet, the abstruse structure of words to be spelled, the gram- mar of sentences to be construed, the complex gym- nastics of copies to be written ? When to the reading, writing, spelling, grammar, and composi- tion in English, we add that of similar exercises in two or three other languages, we evidently de- scribe the education, first, of the children in our public schools, then of those of the so-called " upper classes " ; and show that all is a prolonged study of words. Words are fossils, which, according to the under- standing had of them, are a heap of meaningless stones, or the incarnation of a bygone life. When the child has once learned to handle present exist- ences, he will be prepared to understand the reflec- AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. 5 tions of a past life in language. When he has had some experience in framing complex abstractions, he can then appreciate the complex abstractions of speech. But, until then, language should not be to him an object of thought, but only an organ of thought. It is not to be driven into him, but only out of him, through the urgent consciousness that something must be said. The inflections, intonations, and emphasis of speech, uttered or written, and which include grammar, rhetoric, punctuation, style, must arise spontaneously, as natural clothing of the idea, which insists upon making itself under- stood. An idea which is once sufficiently vivid in the child's mind can hardly fail to " climb to a form in the grass and flowers " of picturesque baby- speech. On this principle it might be useful to precede study of either spoken or written language by study of gestures and signs. At all events, in my own ex- periment, the child was taught algebraic signs as a means of concisely expressing certain relations, long before any attempt was made to learn how to write. Thus the important, fundamental idea was early conveyed to her mind that all arts of expression were subordinate in importance to the subject expressed. Deliberate study of the arts of expression, which is equivalent to the study of litera- ture, rhetoric, and style, was reserved until after many years of study of things should have accumu- lated impressions and ideas which spontaneously 6 AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. sought an outlet. Further, the child was taught to draw in simple combinations of lines for many months before attempting to write. When this difficult and complex muscular exercise was approached, she began it with unusual ease, and in a few weeks, at the age of six, already commanded a firm and legible hand- writing. Further, and for the same purpose, no set copy-book was used from which meaningless sen- tences could be imitated ; but the child proceeded at once to utilize the art of writing in precisely the same way that humanity has done in passing from barbarism with spoken traditions, to civilization with a recorded history. She recorded at first with printed, afterward with script characters, the history of a group of hyacinths, whose development she watched from birth to death. The writing, though compelled to be carefully done, was recognized as no end in itself, but as a means to preserve a connected history of a series of interesting events, otherwise liable to lapse into oblivion. The art was thus ap- proached, as all arts should be, from the standpoint of its real genesis, and tended to place itself in the same relative position in the child's mind that it had occupied in the real history of the world. Study of the pathological conditions of writer's cramp, and of the numerous brain-lesions which have so marvellously dissected the faculty of comprehend- ing verbal and written signs, has revealed a hitherto unsuspected complexity in the muscular movements involved in writing, and of the mental processes AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. J necessary to language. 1 The discovery has not yet modified the glaring crudity of the educational meth- ods which persist in beginning mental training with a forced drill in these complex processes and gymnastics. Not speech abstractions, the highest conquest of the mind, but the development of the visual concep- tions, which are its earliest spontaneous achievement, should be the first object of systematic training. Forms and colors are the elements of all visual impressions ; and these are, moreover, susceptible of a scientific classification which can, from the begin- ning, be rendered appreciable to the child. It is upon forms and colors, therefore, that both percep- tion and memory must first be exercised. The visual impression should be amplified up to the point at which it is able to fix itself on the mind by its own momentum ; therefore, without conscious effort. When the mind has accumulated a stock of reminis- cences which cannot be forgotten, it will, by so much, have enriched its structure and enlarged its furniture. It is then prepared for voluntary efforts at recollection. The amplification of the impression is effected in two ways : 1. The impression may be associated with an action on the part of the child, as when he arranges building-blocks into definite forms. 2. The 1 See Kussmaul, " Stoerungen der Sprache " ; also Lichtheim on " Apha- sia " (Brain, January, 1885). The litAature on these two subjects is already immense. 8 AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. outlines of the object itself may be magnified, and at the same % time roughened, by being copied with sticks, as may be done in the first attempts at map- drawing. The copy substitutes a schematic outline for the real one, but by the very fact blends a mental conception with the simple visual image. This neces- sity for amplification is very important, and, as it seems to me, very often overlooked. It is strictly in accordance with the physiological law in neuro- dynaniics, that a stimulating impression must vary in intensity inversely to the susceptibility of the nerve-element to be impressed. The more developed and vigorous the mind, the slighter the object that is perceived and remembered ; and, as Mr. Froude remarks, men of genius always have tenacious mem- ories. Conversely, the relatively feeble mind of the young child requires a large object to awaken its prehensile faculties. If the memory of children for what has once impressed them is often remarkable, it is because the infantile period of mental devel- opment bears much analogy with the character of genius. It seems to me that for several years no abstract statements should be made to a child, except such as may be, at least schematically, represented by tangi- ble objects, and at every new point of even advanced studies recurrence to such schemas may be usefully made. Perception and memory should be indissoliibly associated. There are two prevalent errors of method AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. 9 which I have noticed : to expect a child to remember what it has never perceived ; and to allow it to per- ceive without any systematic representation of the object in memory. In the earliest training, contem- plation of an object is insufficient to fix its outlines on the mind : it must be handled as well as seen. In my own experiment with a child of four, Froe- bel's building-blocks were used to construct definite models ; but these, once framed, were repeated from memory. Sometimes the details of an exciting story, as that of " Blue-Beard," were associated with the different details of the model, so that these were more vividly remembered. By building in succession the different rooms in which the various acts of the tragedy were supposed to have occurred, the child learned, on the one hand, mathematical outlines ; on the other hand, to remem- ber history by, in a degree, acting history herself. The principle of this method is applicable to much more advanced studies. President Hill, in his eloquent little book on " The True Order of Studies," emphatically insists on the necessity for a selection of studies which differ widely from the conventional programme. " We awake to consciousness," he observes, " through the fact of motion which reveals to us an outer world, and a universe of space and time in which that world of matter moves. These space and time relations are the earliest objects of distinctly conscious intellec- tion, the first objects concerning which our knowl- IO AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. edge takes a scientific form. This was true of the race, and it is true of the individual. Before the child has a clearly intellectual life on any other sub- jects, it attains a very definite power to distinguish the square, the circle, the oval, the spiral ; and also to recognize the rhythm of verse and music. Out of space and time arise through the suggestions of the material world three principal sciences : geometry, arithmetic, algebra. In considering space we are led to imitate the act of the Divine Intellect, which has geometrized from eternity. Geometry is the earliest and simplest of all possible sciences." The writer proceeds to point out that " the earliest abstraction from the idea of form is that of number, and out of this idea is evolved the earliest of the truly abstract sciences, namely, arithmetic. But because this sci- ence is based upon an abstraction, and not upon a direct perception, it should be made to follow, and not, as is usually the case, precede geometry." Again, " the earliest suggestions of motion reveal to us time as well as space. But space is external to the mind ; time enters into our spiritual consciousness, and measures our flow of thought." To this might be added the anatomical considera- tion that the formation of space-conceptions is the function of the cerebrum, from the impressions fur- nished by the optic nerve ; while the conceptions of time are elaborated in the cerebellum from the expe- rience in successions of events furnished by the auditory nerve. Space-conceptions are objective, AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. II static ; time-conceptions, from the beginning subjec- tive, are at first successive, then become progressive, finally causal, dynamic when the conception of cause arises from consideration of the sum of antece- dent events. Thus this second series of conceptions soon impinges upon moral considerations ; the first remains within the sphere of perceptive intelligence. To space, or optic-nerve conceptions, belongs sym- metry ; to time, or auditory-nerve conceptions, belong harmony and rhythm. These ultimate ramifications of the primary psychic phenomenon must be held in mind at the moment of beginning to systematize the visual and auditory perceptions which lie at their basis. All object- teaching may be made useful as a means of training to independent observation. But the study of ordinary, i. e., of complex objects, is neces- sarily empirical, whereas geometric forms can be at once submitted to scientific generalizations, can there- fore at once initiate the child into scientific method. Dr. Hill recommends the study of geometry to be begun at the age of eight. The child upon which my own experiment was performed began the study of geometric elements before she was four. Some details of her education may perhaps be quoted as the best way of illustrating certain abstract princi- ples. At the age of four and a half she had learned the following elements : straight, curved, slanting, and half -slanting lines ; also to distinguish perpen- dicular and horizontal lines, and to draw either 12 AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. straight or curved lines parallel to each other. She was well acquainted with all forms of the triangle, equilateral, isosceles, right angled, and scalene. She knew a rectangle and a square, and the relations to each of the slanting and half-slanting line. She knew also, and was especially fond of, the trapezium, trape- zoid, the pentagon, hexagon, etc., the circle and semi- circle ; and, in solid figures, knew the cube and its apparent relations to the square. She did not merely know the names of these things, but to her eye the Avhole perceptible universe arranged itself spontane- ously into these fundamental forms ; for she was incessantly disentangling them from the complex appearances of surrounding objects. Thus a horse- railroad interested her as an illustration of parallel straight lines which never met, the marks of carriage- wheels as parallel curved lines, the marks of horse- shoes, as " dear little curves." She learned that the curved line was the line of living things, and that straight lines belonged exclusively to artificial objects. At dinner she divided her cake into squares or cubes, and made pentagons and octagons with the knives and forks. She learned that by increasing the num- ber of sides a plane figure gradually progressed from a triangle to a circle ; and thus, on first seeing a cyl- inder, at once compared it to a circle, because " it had ever and ever so many sides," and not to a prism, with which the superficial resemblance might be supposed to be more striking. The habit of looking for the forms of things led AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. 13 the child to the spontaneous observation of the alphabet, which she taught herself by incessantly copying the letters until she was familiar with them. 1 It was at this time that her education devolved upon me, and I began to effect the transition from a sim- ple descriptive study of geometric forms toward some conception of their necessary relations. At first the purely descriptive study of geometric forms was continued, and, for several months and by the help of wooden models, extended from plane to solid figures. Later, when she was five and a half, some necessary relations were taught. Thus the child learned that three was the smallest number of straight lines which could include a space, by building with colored sticks an imaginary fence around a field in which a goat was to be inclosed. It was obvious that, when only two sides of the fence were com- pleted, the goat would be able to run out and wreak all the destruction in the garden which might be anticipated from a reckless and unrestrained goat. An indissoluble association of ideas was thus estab- lished between a geometric necessity and the logic of events. The second axiom taught was the equality of any two objects which were demonstrably equal to the same third. This was learned when the child was five years old ; and illustrated in the first place by its applicability to the solution of problems otherwise 1 This first year of the child's education was carried on in the Kindergar- ten of Mrs. Walton. 14 AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. insoluble. Thus if it became necessary to compare the height of two girls, one of whom lived in Syra- cuse and the other in Boston, but unable to visit each other, a common measure was suggested in the person of a third girl living in New York, of more peripatetic habits, and able to travel from one place to another. By the same device the lesser difficulty was overcome, of comparing the length of a floor and the ceiling of a room through the medium of the wall. Ultimately the problem was illustrated by the less conspicuous mechanisms of colored sticks, and then the first algebraic signs of equality and in- equality were taught, thus preceding all knowledge of writing. When the idea had been thus copiously illustrated and perfectly grasped, the verbal axiom (" things equal to the same things," etc.) was, by ex- ception, given, and learned with ease. This was proved by the child's remark on one occasion of ap- plying the axiom : " I knew what I was thereforeingT In a similar way were taught some other axioms thus, that equals being added to equals the wholes are equal, and that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. The last axiom was illustrated graphically by observation of a large complex fungus which the child happened to pick up during a walk. Each part was apparently independent, yet so inseparable from the whole in which it inhered, and the whole was so obviously composed of these aggregated seg- ments, that the axiom in question seemed to th<& child simply descriptive of the object. AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. 15 Thus the mind was early initiated into the recog- nition of necessary truths, however few, lest other- wise it should never acquire that sense of reality and necessity which is essential to all forcible men- tal and moral action. At the beginning of the year, the child being four and a half, the study of elementary colors was added to that of form. It was begun logically with ob- servation of the rainbow. The child was led to notice and distinguish its colors in their regular order, and subsequently to reproduce this order ex- actly by means of colored sticks. As this was a fundamental observation among those furnished by the universe of things, it was constantly allowed to recur in different combinations in the same way as the original theme of a musical symphony. Thus at first the colored sticks were laid parallel to each other in a simple package. Subsequently the study of form and color was combined by using the same colored sticks to construct angular geometric figures from the triangle to the decagon. Each figure con- sisted of seven of different sizes and colors, placed concentrically to each other in the rainbow order. After several months a third complication was intro- duced, by imagining that each color represented a lineal bed of flowers, the flowers having been pre- viously gathered by the child and their colors com- pared. At this time solid figures would be placed in the centre of the innermost plane figure outlined by the sticks, thus bringing out clearly the relations 1 6 AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. of the sides of such solids to certain planes. Thus a cube would stand in a square, a tetrahedron or pyramid in the centre of a triangle. This last case offered the occasion for a somewhat wide reach of fancy ; for pictures were shown exhibiting pyramids in the Egyptian Desert, to imitate which the table was strewed with sand. Then the different triangles w T ere outlined with sticks, representing successive beds of flowers breaking the desolation of the desert, thus, roses and pinks, then marigolds, then yellow snap-dragons, jonquils, and laburnums ; then a bed of green leaves, another of periwinkles and blue-bells, a sixth of hyacinths, and a seventh of violets. Thus the entire exercise embraced conceptions of form, and of the relations of plane to solid geometric figures ; conceptions of color ; discovery of the origin of these in a grand cosmic phenomenon ; utilization of colors as one means of classification in a new science, that of botany ; impressions of beauty from the ac- tual color combinations, and from reference, partly actual, partly from memory, to the lovely flowers suggested; finally, a large imagination of a distant land more or less distinctly suggested by the picture. The exercise was thus both orderly and complex; it required a prolonged effort of sustained attention, and implied the association of quite a number of different ideas into a single massive conception. Finally, none of these ideas were represented by a verbal formula, but each as the scarcely removed abstraction from a tangible object that the child AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. \J could freely handle. The exercise was thus a typi- cal illustration of the methods which I have defined as suited to develop a higher order of intellectual capacity. The second step in the study of cosmic phenomena, which had been begun by observation of the rainbow, consisted in the study of the points of the compass. The child was first taught to construct, from Kinder- garten tablets, figures which might serve to indicate the points of the compass ; afterward she was obliged to recognize these points out-of-doors by reference to the rising and setting sun. Every morning she ascer- tained the direction of the winds and waves. She was then taught the points on a real compass, and how to direct her country walks by means of this in- strument. This was her first initiation into the use of instruments of precision. It was gradually extended during the year by means of practical experiments with the mathematical compass, ruler, spirit-level, pulley, wedge, and balance. The use of the last instrument, together with that of practical measures, greatly simplified and abridged the labor ordinarily devoted in arithmetic to learning about weights and measures. The child was taught the metric system first, because it was logical, because it assimilated readily with American decimal currency, and because the mutual interconversion of weight and capacity, practically demonstrated e. g., by showing that a cubic centimetre of water weighed a gramme, pre- pared the way for the great idea, to come later, of 1 8 AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. scientific correlations. The English weights and measures were learned afterward, as historical acci- dents, not logical, but of some practical convenience, as purely contingent knowledge to be acquired prac- tically as the occasion presented itself. She was sent to the grocer's to buy a bushel of apples, com- pared quarts, pecks, etc., together, and was never troubled with the mere memorization of tables. After knowledge of the rainbow and the points of the compass, the third cosmic notion required was that of perspective. This was first learned by watch- ing ships passing over the water near which the child was playing, and observing the diminution of size as the distance increased. This observation made a profound impression upon the child. It was, per- haps, the first time that she learned that appearances do not always correspond to the reality of things, and that simple perceptions must be constantly con- trolled by an effort of the reasoning intellect. A year later, thus, when the child was five years old, the subject of perspective was reviewed in a differ- ent connection. She tried to draw a cube, and was shown the device by which a slanting line is made to represent a retreat from the foreground to a distance. This new discovery proved as exciting as the first had been, and it was speedily tested on all the pic- tures hanging in the room. On the first occasion perspective had appeared like a great and astonish- ing fact of the external universe ; on the second, like an immense achievement of the human intellect, AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION, 19 which had thus contrived to accomplish the appar- ently impossible namely, the representation of solid objects on a flat surface. The lifting of such large horizons makes epochs in the history of the intellect ! The study was not confined to the form or line, but extended to observation of the effect of light and shade the darkness of a receding surface, the bright- ness of the nearest point of a spherical surface, etc. Then the child reproduced these effects in her own drawing. At this time the child began the study of geo- graphical maps as another method of emphasizing space-conceptions. For so young a child the dissect- ting map was much simpler than would have been the attempt to make actual surveys of familiar locali- ties, as is sometimes recommended. These were de- ferred till a little later. By the aid of the dissecting map the child learned the outline of each of the United States, and their exact relations to each other, while still quite unable to read the names printed upon the models. In putting the map together, the compass was again brought into requisition, and the table on which the map was constructed turned until it faced the real north. The relative situation of places was always learned by reference to the com- pass, and not by arbitrary signs. With so young a child it was impossible to asso- ciate much real information with these unknown states whose geometrical outlines she studied ; there- fore, every facility was offered to establish associa- 20 AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. tions of fantasy, either with the shape of the pieces or with the names, associations which the child usually discovered for herself. Thus, she described Virginia as a kneeling camel ; Texas, for some rea- son which I could not appreciate, as a man leaning on his pipe ; Maine, as a dog's head ; Tennessee, as a boy's sled, etc. The study of the one dissecting map was pursued uninterruptedly for six months. In a few weeks the child had learned to identify and name each piece, either on her model or on other maps, and could put each in its place. Before she left the map she was able to bound any State with the models, or verbal- ly ; also to make strips of successive States, begin- ning at any point and running in any direction.. With the entrance upon her second year, at the age of five and a half, the child began the study of maps from " Cornell's Geography." But in a very little while these were exchanged for a large relief-globe. From the time the child began the study of this globe it became difficult for me to understand how any other method could ever be employed. The pictu- resque effect of the distinctly outlined continents, visible at a considerable distance, separated by vast tracts of desolate ocean, in which, as the child re- marked, " one could easily drown," the mutual rela- tions of parts whose perception need never be dis- turbed, as is incessantly done when the pupil passes from map to map, all these effects and impressions can be obtained from nothing else but from a globe AN EXPERIMENT IN\ PRIMARY EDUCATION. 21 of adequate size and in relief. The child, when just six, began to draw maps from, this globe. On a single very large piece of paper would be represented whatever outlines were discoverable at the maxi- mum distance and at a certain aspect of the globe. The latter was then revolved somewhat, the child remaining at the same distance, and a new map out- lined as before, and so on until the entire globe had been, in the major outlines, copied by the child. It was reserved for months of future study to fill in the details in proportion to their successive natural, not political, importance. Four different spheres of thought were prepared for by this study. First, and most obviously, the foundations were laid for all knowledge of physical geography. This foundation was laid in vivid sense- impressions, and unalloyed with the singular mess of political, historical, and commercial details, with which even the best geographical text-books for chil- dren are filled, and which are quite irrelevant to the main issue. When the child could with her finger trace the watercourses all around the world, she re- ceived a large fundamental impression not easily for- gotten. Incidentally in this tracing she learned the value of canals at the isthmuses of Suez and Panama. Secondly, a solid foundation was laid for history. The first map drawn was of Africa, on account of its simplicity of outline ; but this involved the basin of the Mediterranean. The second map, passing east- ward, took in the strongly accentuated outlines sur- 22 AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. rounding the Indian Ocean, and indicated the Himalaya and the high table-lands of Northern India. In the future it was intended, with these same out- lines under the eye, and the picture of them deeply graven on the brain, to indicate the descent of Aryan ancestors from these table-lands toward the Mediter- ranean basin the germinal spot of our historical world ; thence the further spread westward to the new hemisphere. The conception of an historical germinal spot was again prepared for in advance, by showing the child the cicatricule of a hen's egg, lying like the Mediterranean basin, on a globe. Thirdly, study of the systematized topography of the globe constituted the best initiation into the study of all topographical relations, including those involved in animal anatomy, and therefore this consideration was not among the least important. Fourthly, an import- ant elementary philosophical training was obtained, as the child learned to analyze into their details the largest pictures offered by the globe, and to arrange these details into orders of successive degrees of gen- eralization. Great care was taken that all pictures or outlines of the same magnitude, and hence visible at the same distance, should be studied at the same time, and not associated with less conspicuous details that required more minute attention. This rule of following successive degrees of generalization in geographical analysis is most imperfectly observed in text-books. It imposes itself in study of the relief- globe. II. AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. (Continued.) Only one attempt was made during this year to teach the child the meaning of words. It was done through a simple generalization which had become indispensable in the study of geometry, when she passed from plane to solid figures. By means of wooden models she learned, in addition to the cube, the sphere, ovoid, oblate, cylinder, prism, tetrahedron, octahedron, and dodecahedron. She then was led to make parallel lines of plane and solid figures with a corresponding number of sides or angles ; then to abstract the Greek numerals tri, tetra, penta, Jiexa, etc., found to belong to both columns, and set this in the centre, with the syllable gon on one side and hedron on the other. An hour was required to com- plete the setting out of these figures and arranging these titles with movable letters, which for the first time the child learned to use for spelling. The exer- cise was, of course, repeated again and again, until every step was perfectly familiar. From the begin- ning the child had no difficulty in connecting the plane and solid figures, nor in learning the numerals appropriate to each. The new effort at abstraction and classification was at first somewhat hard, but 23 24 AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. soon became easy. The facility with which the im- pression of forms may be made upon a child's mind, when this is as yet uncrowded by notions on the other qualities of objects, was shown by a little inci- dent at this period. A few weeks after having made her first acquaintance with the oblate, she saw at dinner for the first time some small stewed onions. " Oh ! " she exclaimed, " they have brought us some oblates for dinner." Another day, when she acci- dentally pulled the cord of a window-shade in a cer- tain position, she observed that she had thus made "two scalene triangles." Looking at the ceiling above a lamp, she called to me to notice how the light made three " beautiful concentric circles." One other study during the year was made upon the intrinsic meaning of words. In the course of some observations on plants the child had learned to recognize the ovary and ovule, and to herself dissect them, out of a flower. When this had been done the analogy between the vegetable ovule and chicken- egg or ovum was easily pointed out, and the relation of the latter to the geometric ovoid. The four ob- jects were then placed in a row on the table, the names of each spelled with movable letters, and then the common root ov described and taken out. The important and fundamental idea was thus grasped that there was an intrinsic meaning to at least some words, and also that objects associated by a common name, whose specific variations were of subordinate importance, must be classed together as AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. 2$ deeply related, notwithstanding superficial difference of aspect. But this idea, once distinctly enunciated and understood, was then set aside for a season. That the idea was understood, I tested in the follow- ing way : At table the child remarked that a particu- lar potato was " shaped like an egg." " What shall we then call it ? " I asked. " An ovoid," was the reply. " Very good. Do you know what I thought you might call it ? " " An ovum, " she answered, with an air of mischievous triumph. "And why did you not ? " " Because it is not an egg, but only shaped like an egg." I tempted the child with the suggestion that she should tease the waiter by asking him to bring us some ovules instead of eggs ; but the instinctive modesty of childhood recoiled from the pedantic proposition. The necessity for precision in the use of terms, thus initiation into scientific terminology, was en- forced incidentally on another occasion. A playfel- low, much older than the child, picked up a piece of mica and called it isinglass. This conventional inac- curacy I strongly rebuked, and, procuring a piece of real isinglass, led the child to note its difference, and to condemn in private and without malice the slovenly language of her presumably untaught comrade. Now, the child had a doll called Rosa, and was in the habit of illustrating any absurdity by pretending that Rosa was guilty of it. Some time after the con- versation on the isinglass she was watching a stream of water falling into the sunlight from a hose. She 26 AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. exclaimed : " See the beautiful silver water coming from the old gray hose. Rosa would have called that mica ! " When the box of wooden geometric models was thoroughly mastered, after about six months' study, I procured for the child a set of models of crystals, such as are used for studying mineralogy. About half of these proved too complex for study, but the child easily learned to recognize and distinguish twenty-six, partly simple, partly compound forms. As each face of the crystal showed some plane figure which she had already learned, and as she was also familiar with the Greek numerals from three to twelve, it was generally easy for the child to devise the name of the crystal, even when apparently so repelling as a scalenhedron, rhombic dodecahedron, right rhombic pyramid, etc. It was interesting to notice her capacity to discern the general outline of a crystal and thus its generic features, and afterward to distinguish the secondary divisions of its sides, or the specific characters ; thus in a four-faced cube, a three- or six-faced tetrahedron, a three-faced octa- hedron, etc. The forms in the four systems of crys- tallization were learned by repeated handling of the models, until the child's perceptions had become saturated with them, and she could, for instance, discover for herself four-faced cubes in the curved molding on staircases. Then, at the beginning of the second year, the crystals began to be copied in clay, and opportunity then afforded for studying their AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. 2J axes, or the basis of their classification, by means of long pins thrust through the soft model in appropri- ate direction. Arithmetic, the second science in Dr. Hill's cate- gory, was begun several months after the first studies of form and outline. Instead of the beans so fre- quently recommended, the child used sticks of differ- ent sizes and colors. For two or three months she studied such numbers as seem almost to form natu- ral complex entities, and hence have often been sacred numbers, thus : four, nine, ten, twelve, twenty- four, thirty-six. The child was exercised in dividing these up into symmetrical groups, whose resem- blances she was trained to tell at a glance by the eye before enumeration. Thus she learned to form groups of threes, fours, and sixes, and to unite them in as many fantastic combinations as could be in- vented. The object was to effect the transition from the perception of form to the conception of number by a series of visual impressions as vivid as possible. The breaking up of a whole into parts really precedes in facility the additioning of parts into a whole, for the reason that the power of de- struction in a child obviously precedes the power of construction. Froebel's fifth gift of cubical blocks has its first application on this fact, since the entire mass forming a cube may be broken up into twenty- seven smaller cubes. When we reached the number twenty-seven, I told the child it was the smallest cube that existed. But she having a year previously, 28 AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. when only four years old, learned to handle these same cubes, corrected my error, and demonstrated triumphantly that eight blocks would make a still smaller cube. The incident shows the tenacity of ideas once implanted in the right way and at the right time. It is much more difficult to teach a child to sub- tract than to add, a fact upon which Warren Colburn sagaciously comments. In the discussion of practi- cal problems a hitch often occurs in the child's mind which may be quite unsuspected by the teacher. Thus, if Henry and Arthur go to buy a ball which costs sixteen cents, and one boy had six cents and the other seven, I found the child unable to solve the problem as to how many more cents were needed, because, as she said, she could not take thirteen from sixteen, since the very trouble was that the boys did not have sixteen cents. It was necessary to use sticks, and with the distinct formal agreement that those of one color should be known to represent an imaginary number, those of another color the num- ber of actual things manipulated. But what a stride for a young child's mind to make, into a sphere neither real nor imaginary, but where the existent and the non-existent are indissolubly associated in an ordinary practical affair of every-day life ! From the beginning the decimal system imposed itself spontaneously upon the child's mind, on account of the facility of visibly recognizing groups of five and ten sticks, and of verbally recognizing AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. 2g their successive additions. In this way the multi- plication table the famous despair of little Marjorie Fleming was mastered with great ease by this far less gifted child. Every one remembers the fierce vehemence of Pet Marjorie's protest, " But 7 times 9 is devilish, and what Nature itself can't endure ! " It is so, if presented as an isolated fact. The child I taught, however, discovered of herself that the successive addition of tens was as easy as that of ones. After that, when she came to add (or multi- ply by) nines, she would say, " first add ten," then say, " and nine was one less." If it were eight, it / > O ' was two less, etc. After a fortnight of these exer- cises, she was asked one day out of study-hours what was the sum of 14 and 19, and answered immediately " 33." Upon being asked to explain the process, she said, "10 and 19 makes 29, then I must add 4 more, and 1 and 29 are 30, and 3 more are 33." When three decimals were reached, a somewhat laborious exercise was performed. Thus, to operate with 138, the number 100 was constructed out of ten packages of purple sticks, each package containing ten sticks. These packages were placed in a row ; underneath was a second row, containing, to represent the number 30, three packages of yellow sticks, each containing ten ; finally, a third row of eight units was made with green sticks in a single series. In this exercise the sticks were all of the same size; in another, later, a hundred was repre- sented by a single long stick, usually purple, a ten 3O AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. by a yellow stick next in size, a unit by a stick stiL smaller and green. Thus the original and clumsier representation was condensed by the substitution of an expressive sign for the literal numbers, and as soon as the sticks became used as signs, and not as the objects really to be counted, the mutual relation of their respective sizes also ceased to be literally exact, and became merely schematic. Thus was gradually managed a transition to the use of pure written signs or symbols. The transition initiated and enlarged the condensation of Roman into Arabic numerals. Knowledge of the process of subtrac- tion, especially in three or more decimals, was essentially facilitated by this device with sticks, and the terrible difficulty of borrowing ten quite over- come. Thus, if the number 288 were to be taken from 362, the larger number would be represented by three long purple sticks, six shorter yellow sticks,, and two green sticks, the shortest of all. These colors were always selected because harmonizing so well with each other. Then similarly the 288 was represented by two purple, eight yellow, and eight green sticks. It was easily recognized by the child, that one of the yellow sticks could be removed from the ten sections of the 362, and ten green sticks sub- stituted, bringing the entire number of units up to twelve, from which the eight of the lower figures could be taken. It was also obvious that, when one yellow stick had been taken away, only seven remained. There was no need, therefore, to employ AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. 31 the usual confusing statement that a ten must be borrowed from the upper figures, and later restored to a different place in the lower. The study of abstract numbers, with Colb urn's arithmetic, was begun when the child was five and a half years. At the end of a year she had thoroughly mastered the first four rules, including both " short " and " long " division, and was considerably advanced in the study of fractions, proper and improper. The last study entered upon during this year was that of natural objects, and, for obvious reasons, plants were chosen for this purpose. I suppose that most persons seriously interested in education are acquainted with Miss Youman's admirable little " First Lessons in Botany," and the plea she makes for this science as a typical means of training the observing powers of children. According to her plan, the first object studied is the leaf and the pupil is taught at once, not only to draw the leaf, but to fill out a schedule of description of it. Much may be said in favor of this method, which proceeds from the simple to the complex form ; but it is by no means the only possible method ; the writing part of the scheme is, moreover, impossible for a child who has not yet learned how to write. There is another method, which consists in seizing at once upon the most striking aspect of the subject, and which shall make the most vivid impression upon the imagina- tion. For this purpose the leaf is the least useful, the flower the most so. The earliest botanical classifica- 32 AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. tions are based upon the corolla, and, in accordance with a principle already enunciated, a child may often best approach a science through the series of ideas that attended its genesis. The conditions are different for an adult, who requires to get the latest results ; the child's mind is always remote from these, but often singularly near to the conceptions entertained by the first observers. Again, it is unnatural to enter upon the beautiful world of plants by the study of forms and outlines which is much better pursued when abstracted from all other circumstances, as in models of pure mathematical figures. But with plants comes a new idea that of life, of change, of evolution. It is fitting that this tremendous idea make a profound impression on the child's mind ; and this impression may be best secured by watching the continuous growth of a plant from the seed. The study of life is a study of events, of dynamics, of catastrophies. The earliest observation perceives the extraordinary influence of the surrounding me- dium upon the destinies of the living organism. It is not difficult to surround these destinies with such a halo of imagination as shall impress on the mind a sense of the mystery, sanctity I may add, the necessary calamities of life, before it has become absorbed in the consideration of living personalities. I trust it will not seem a piece of bathos when I add that I initiated the pursuit of these objects by making the child watch the growth of seven beans on a saucer of cotton-wool. A specimen bean was AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. 33 first dissected, and its principal parts named the cotyledons, the embryo with its radicle and plumula, the episperm. The daily reference to these terms speedily rendered the child quite familiar with them. To seven other beans were given appropriate names, as of a band of brothers, and they were then planted on cotton-wool by the child. A daily journal of events was opened, in which I wrote each day or two, at the child's dictation. As she had learned the Arabic numerals, she inserted these herself in the protocol whenever necessary. The entire history of each bean was thus written out, and the successive steps of its development, from the thrilling moment when the radicle first peeped out, to the time when, after transplantation to a flower-pot, the plumula had developed to a long trailing vine. The rate of growth of this vine was measured day by day ex- actly, with a rule, the number of leaves counted, etc. But the mathematical considerations were here sub- ordinated to a larger idea, that of the succession of events. Some of the beans moulded early in their career, and the relations of this catastrophe to the accidental differences of position, moisture, etc., were carefully studied. On one occasion the child dic- tated to me the following entry for the journal : " The episperm, on the under surface of Tertius, is all black, and has split, leaving a space the shape of an equilateral triangle, with the apex pointing to the convex edge of the cotyledons." In the summer, when flowers could be obtained from the woods in 34 AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. abundance, the child made collections of ovaries and ovules, and was never tired of finding the latter asleep in their beds in so many differently shaped houses. At this time the static considerations were allowed to predominate, and the child rather forgot the function of the embryo seeds so much so that, upon seeing some small pieces of ice lying in half a musk-melon, she said that these were like the ovules in an ovary. At the beginning of the second year, the study of plant-growth was resumed with seven hyacinths, that received appropriate names, as seven sisters. The first lessons in written expression coin- cided with the beginning of this new study ; for now the child was allowed to write the plant-journal her- self. The exercise was complex. The child first examined the hyacinths, and noted whether any thing had transpired since the last observation. She then framed a spoken sentence, in which such an event was accurately described. She then dictated the writing of this sentence as a whole, which she was afterward to copy. During this dictation, some knowledge of spelling was incidentally acquired ; for the child was led to spell by sound, and without reference to silent letters. The words she had not yet seen. Finally, when fairly at work at the writ- ing, the meaning of the sentence was temporarily ignored, and attention closely concentrated upon the forms of the letters, and no mercy shown to inaccu- rate imitation of them. Thus, one day she entered the observation that Blanche, in a blue glass, had AA r EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. 35 grown much more vigorously than Aura, in a dark one ; and a blue glass was given to the less favored sister, in the hope that she would improve. She noted that the tips of the white roots were gray and conoid in shape (making the observation herself in- dependently), and was allowed to demonstrate the function of these tips by cutting one off and seeing the growth of that root arrested. On another day, she first discovered, then described, then wrote down, that the first broad leaves of Blanche had split open, showing two others at right angles to them. This was her first perception of this remarkable law of phyllotaxy, and she herself illustrated it by making two loops with the thumb and finger of each hand, and making them intersect each other. The previous acquisition of mathematical conception was con- stantly shown to facilitate and render precise her observations of complex objects. It was rather as a concession to a prevailing prejudice that at this time the child was taught to read. This study, usually made of the most import- ance, was held for this child to be quite subordinate and easy, and little stress laid upon it. The child was allowed to follow her own inclination, to divine the subject of the chapter from the picture at the head of it, and, to a considerable extent, the words in each sentence from the context ; when the wrong word was thus suggested, she was obliged to spell out the real word by sounds, always seeking first the central or predominant sound, and building up the word 36 AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. around it, instead of enumerating the letters in order. Thus in the word scratch she took the letters a t y as the central nucleus, preceding the first by the sound of r t then of c, then of s ; then, when the sound scrat was complete, adding that of ch. She was made to read as much and as rapidly as possible, relying upon constant repetition and association of ideas to secure familiarity. Thus unconsciously the conception was continued, that written as well as spoken language was an outgrowth of thought, before the attempt was made to study it as an object of thought. This method is like that of learning to walk before studying the laws of Weber on locomotion. This method may seem slovenly, but, after all, it is both the natural and scientific method of studying an unknown tongue, which must be deciphered by the context. How else did Champollion read the Rosetta stone, or Eliot find a written language for his Indian Bible ? Throughout this period the task of reading was treated as something so easy as to be insignificant, and was so regarded by the child her- self. 1 The main intellectual work of the day's lessons (whose duration was never more than an 'hour and a half) was concentrated upon the arith- metic, map-drawing, analysis of fiowers, and the geometrical studies, that she now pursued by the help of Hill's " First Lessons," and Spencer's " In- 1 What is easy, when taken instinctively, may be incredibly difficult when itself becomes the object of thought and study. AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. 37 ventional Geometry." She studied angles, vertical and adjacent, the relations of angles and circles, and the measurement of the former by the latter. Exercises in these were practised daily with compass and ruler; and, when lines drawn with the pencil failed to give a large enough visual impression, they were designed with colored sticks. This enlarge- ment of the material illustration never failed to clear up any obscurities. At the time these notes cease, the child was six and a half years old. I have tried to make clear in these few notes the outlines of a (single) experiment, which seems to me to show that the mental education of even a very young child may be imbued with the scientific meth- ods and even ideas which should furnish suitable prep- aration for advanced scientific studies. It cannot be a matter of indifference that such habits of mind are acquired from the beginning, or only after much previous faulty training. What comes first will always remain the most important, will always dominate the rest. Experience in the medical edu- cation of women has repeatedly brought home to me the difficulty of teaching such an art as medicine to persons who come to it through the prevailing systems of school discipline, especially those which are applied to girls. Experience with one little girl at least, convinces me that the aptitude for vivid and accurate perception, and for scientific method in ideas, often exists where unsuspected, and only demanding proper cultivation. 38 AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. As an illustration of the method described in the text, when carried into more complete studies, I insert an exercise written by the child when six and a quarter years old. It is a descrip- tion of a wild Iris, which she analyzed herself on successive days, writing down the results from memory on the next day. She was never told any thing, but obliged to discover for herself each fact, to compose the sentence describing it, and to spell by ear the words of the sentence without copy. She was allowed to insert in her description whatever fancies occurred to her. The headings and order of evolution of the subject were alone dictated. With nearly all the technical terms she was, however, already familiar ; two only were told " peri- anth," as opposed to corolla, and " blade." Before analyzing the Iris she was obliged to take a long walk to the woods for it, and first to draw a map showing the way, and by means of the compass. Two intersecting lines from sight-objects were dictated by me, and the fact learned by this and another previous experiment which had failed, that to locate an object in space at least two lines are required. The final description, whose writing occupied two or three weeks, was as follows : The Rainbow Family. (This name was given as a literal translation of Irtdacece, and as a return in a spiral to the first natural object studied eighteen months before, the rainbow. The way was also prepared for the future historical study of the myth of Iris.) Iris Tricolor. (The numeral was already familiar.) Perianth = 6 Petals. (The algebraic signs and numbers were used to indicate that in a scientific document, not a flowing style, but the fewest words and most concise expres- sions were required.) These stand on top of a long tube in which the style is locked in. There are two kinds of petals : i. Three which are the biggest, and have three colors. There are two parts to each the upper broad part called the blade, and the lower long narrow part. (The term " blade " was here taught for the first time.) The blade is first purple ; in the middle is a gold AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. 39 stripe which runs into the narrow part. (At this point, the child drew and painted from memory, on the margin of her protocol, a picture of the petal.) Between the purple and gold the blade is white. These petals curve outward and down- ward, so that the gold stripe comes on top. The bees see it and come for the pollen. (First introduction of a Darwinian law.) 2. Three petals, which are entirely purple, are vertical, smaller, and stand between the others. (The child made another drawing by opening the flower on the page and tracing its outlines.) It is as if six girls were standing in a circle (here was introduced a botanical outline of the whorl, instinctively devised by the child, the circle being drawn accurately with compasses). Every other one leans back and stretches her arms out horizontally, as if to show her gold bracelet. The three others lean forward, and hold their arms up above their heads. (Prolonged contemplation of this lovely group tended to evoke such instinctive aesthetic conceptions as are at the basis of many pieces of statuary, notably Thorwaldsen's Graces.) The gold stripe is like the orange feathers on the head of the bee-martin. The bees think it is a flower, and come and settle on the bird's head ; then he catches them. (This illustration was suggested by the child, shortly after having seen such a bird which had been shot. She thus learned to step from one section of natural history to another, and also to seek analogies of organs in their functions.) Mamma says (here knowledge by testimony is distinguished from that obtained by personal observation, which has not yet reached so far) that all flowers that want the bees to visit them have bright colors. This is like ladies who want the gentlemen to visit them, and then put on their finest clothes. The Great Mistake. We thought there were three more petals in the middle of the corolla. These were smaller than the others, and divided at the top like a funny M. (The child then made a drawing in illustration.) Each stands inside a gold-striped petal, and has a groove on the outer side like a bath-tub. In this a princess is bathing. She is a stamen, with 4O AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION. a long, whitish anther like a veil over her head. So there were three stamens inserted with the petals. How we found out the Truth. (This process is introduced with some solemnity, as befits its importance.) i. We looked to see how the pollen got on the stigma. (Introduction to the biological method of studying structure in association with function.) 2. We noticed that the pollen could slip down the groove into the tube leading to the ovary. 3. We saw that the petal-like pieces were fastened together in the middle of the perianth, making a solid white cylinder which passed into the green tube. (Another drawing from memory illustrated this.) 4. It was plain that the white cylinder was the style, because it went to the ovary. 5. Then mamma said (recogni- tion of authority and testimony again) that the petal-like pieces were the stigma, immensely big. (The incident showed the function of the reason in unravelling the deceptions imposed by the senses and the superficial aspect of things.) Ovary at the bottom of the tube (ovary inferior) has three lodges and a great many ovules. (Thus the botanical analysis was rigidly accurate and com- plete. But, instead of being a dry schedule, it comprised a mass of vivid, glowing impressions destined to remain forever as a typical group of ideas in the child's mind. The prolonged, patient, sympathetic study of the individual preceded the abstract study of a class of flowers. In the future it was intended that the child should construct her own classes from among the botanical individuals she should really learn to know.) III. THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. " Quod she agen, ' But to whom do ye owe Your service ? and which wolle ye honour, Tel me I pray, this yere, the Leaf or the Flower ? ' " CHAUCER, " The Flower and the Leaf." The comments made by Miss Youinans, 1 upon a single remark in my article on " Primary Education," show how much can be unfolded out of an apparently limited subject, when all its bearings are thoroughly discussed. Already this discussion trenches upon several philosophical principles which involve much more than the apparently trivial question whether children should begin the study of botany by the flower or the leaf. An inquiry into these principles may therefore not be uninteresting. Miss Youmans lays down certain propositions, with some of which I do in reality agree, while with others I am in decided disagreement, for reasons I will take the liberty of here setting forth. Thus : 1. Children should study the external characters of plants before attempting to study their life- processes or physiology. 2. Children cannot be suitably impressed with 1 Popular Science Monthly, October, 1885. 41 42 THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. such " tremendous ideas as evolution," and therefore it is useless to signalize these to them. 3. Children should not be detained to draw the leaves or other natural objects they study, because of "the delay" thus entailed, and because "they could not draw one in a hundred of the specimens with which it is necessary that they become familiar." 4. The modern systems of botanical classification are based on the sum total of the characters of the plant, and not on the corolla. It is therefore unphilo- sophical to study the flower containing the corolla first, merely because it is more showy. The sensuous pleasure derived from its contemplation is superficial as compared with the deeper intellectual pleasure of tracing the scientific relations of the leaf. 5. Finally, it is an axiom that cannot be disputed, that mental effort should advance from the simple subject to the more complex. The leaf is much simpler than the flower, and is therefore much better suited for beginning the study of botany. To consider these propositions in order : 1 and 2. In regard to the first I am substantially in entire agreement with Miss Youmans, as indeed is shown by the examples given in the " Experiment." No attempt was made to really study the physiology of plants ; while the external and obvious characters of the most conspicuous portions, the parts, namely, of the flower, were studied, or rather submitted to a prolonged contemplation. Only, upon first crossing the threshold of this new world, the most character- THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. 43 istic facts which distinguished it were pointed out in a manner designed to make as profound an impression as possible upon the imagination. These are the facts of life and growth and death, the germination of the seed, the influence of surrounding media, the cir- cumstance that the plant offers a constant succession of changing phenomena, and thus was an entirely different object from a stone, or a mathematical figure, or a rainbow. Now, while it is perfectly true that the term " evolution " and the vast series of ideas and masses of facts suggested by it cannot be rendered comprehensible to a child, and that it would be the grossest pedantry to even mention it to him, yet the great fact of growth and incessant change in living organisms is perfectly appreciable through impressions made on his senses, and is well fitted to arouse in him a lively interest and curiosity. The fact of life the essential nature of life as a series of incessant changes is perhaps the most fundamental fact with which the mind will ever become acquainted. It is also among the most primitive and earliest encountered; the mode of impression it makes upon the mind permanently stamps all the thoughts and systems of thought the mind ever entertains. For, whence spring all reli- gions, and cosmogonies, and even ethical systems, but from the primitive thoughts held upon life and death ? How many immoralities depend upon false estimates of life, of its nature, its values ! How many erroneous theories of life might be corrected 44 THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. by the early habit of direct, unbiased observation of living things ! In the building of a brain, the earliest ideas always remain the most powerful, because upon them the entire mental structure is destined to repose ; or, since the mind is a living organism, it were better to compare its primitive ideas, not to the foundation- stones of a house, but to the central medullary rings of a tree. What is on the surface while the plant is young soon becomes central by the successive super- position of new impressions, the new circles being constantly intersected by rays prolonged from the central pith. The selection of the earliest ideas and impressions is therefore of the highest importance ; they should be not only negatively good, that is, innocent, but, when possible, really powerful, that is, brought from the depths of things, and able to sus- tain all the future life of the mind possessing them. And, since direct perception of facts must precede reasoning upon the inferences which may be drawn from them, it is not only legitimate, but important to impress the imagination with typical and fundamental facts, long before these can be reasoned upon, or their laws really understood. This is my lengthy reason for the simple experiment of studying the growth of beans on a saucer of cotton-wool experiment de- signed not to teach physiology, but to make an early revelation of life. In this connection, however, is worth noting a special reason for preferring the flower to the leaf for early study. It is agreed that the functions of THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF: 45 living organisms are too difficult for such study ; nevertheless, it is desirable to indicate functions when possible, because the fact of function is one eminently characteristic of living things. Now, the function of the leaf is respiration, which cannot pos- sibly be made intelligible to the child. It involves chemical relations, which are the latest appreciable, and cannot be exhibited except by means of experi- ments, for which the young child is quite unpre- pared. The absence of the visible phenomena of animal respiration, moreover, that is, of the exha- lation of the breath and movements of the thorax, render an attempt to identify the function in plants and animals confusing and apparently con- tradictory. On the other hand, the function of the flower re- production can be rendered perfectly intelligible to the child, when he is told that the pollen feeds the ovules, which then visibly grow into seeds, while the ovary ripens to fruit. This statement seems to the child in accordance with his own most urgent per- sonal necessities, and in the common facts of feeding and growth he finds himself linked with other organ- isms in Nature. It is quite congenial to the normal fetichism of a young child's mind to regard plants as animals ; and legends of dryads are as natural to him as to the infancy of the human race. But the assimilation of animals to plants through the molecular processes of nutrition common to both (though perhaps unconsciously foreshadowed in the 46 THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. story of Narcissus) was not for mankind distinctly formulated until the time of Bichat ; and, for the individual intelligence, its comprehension must be deferred until nearly to adolescence. 3. I must plead guilty to an inaccuracy when, quot- ing from memory, I said that Miss Youmans recom- mended her pupils to draw the leaves that they studied. But I fell into the error all the more read- ily, because such a direction entirely commended itself to my own judgment. Nor can I agree at all with the reasons which Miss Youmans now advances in opposition to this method. If the aim at the time be not to learn botany, but " to cultivate the observ- ing powers of children," what danger is there in a " delay " which permits the object to become more deeply graven on the child's mind ? Why is it so " necessary to become familiar with hundreds of specimens " in a given time ? Why not rather with a few, a very few striking and typical forms, around which subsequent knowledge can group itself ? The comparison of a multitude of objects in order to ab- stract their common characters, and thus obtain the generic or class conception, is suited to the scientific, but not to the pre-scientific stage of progress. It does not, therefore, belong to the fruitful moment of first attraction to an object, which, for the adult mind, precedes scientific discovery, and contains the hidden forces which lead to this. Still less does it belong to the first mental efforts of childhood. Early childhood is a period for the differentia- THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. 47 tion of the details of a universe, which, to the earliest perceptions, appears to consist entirely of homogeneous masses of light and shade. In the first efforts of the mind these masses are broken up and separated from one another, and portions reinte- grated into actual individuals. Thus the moon is separated from the window-pane, the child's limbs are integrated into a body, which at last is positively known to be different from other moving forms, etc. It is in accordance with this spontaneous and, in- deed, inevitable mode of development of perception, that the first educated efforts of perception should be directed toward the more intense individualiza- tion of objects, and not to their classification ; toward the thorough appreciation of specific differences, rather than to that of generic resemblances. Hence, a sec- ond reason for beginning the study of botany say, rather, the observation of life with the flower, although more complex, and not with the simpler leaf. It is because the individual differences of the flower are so much more striking, and as the poets show us the flower is so much more readily indi- vidualized and personified. 1 The period of development with which my " Ex- periment " was concerned may be called the pre- scientific stage of mental existence. It is that during which the mind may be busily occupied in collecting 1 Trees, however, seem to have occasionally shared the poetic individuali- zation. There is Emerson's " Pine-Tree," and " The Pine and the Palm " of Heine, not to speak of "The Fir-Tree" of Hans Andersen ; and who could forget " The Talking Oak " ? 48 THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. the data for science, but cannot itself wield scien- tific methods. Its efforts should be directed in accordance with scientific principles of psychology, and the knowledge acquired arranged in such order- ly sequence that, when the mind is ripe for them, scientific relations will be readily perceived and understood. But discussion of such relations seems to me entirely premature for the age here considered, and, indeed, for a much later period. Scientific observation is observation of the relations between things. But, before any attempt be made to study these relations, the things themselves should be firmly and clearly apprehended. The different degree of grasp possessed by different minds depends largely upon differences in the degree of vividness and fervor with which they are impressed by indi- vidual objects, which leave so many persons in the most limp indifference, while exciting in others an absorbing and even passionate interest. When the individual impressions are so clear, distinct, charac- teristic, and interesting as to be quite unforgettable, they soon force upon the mind, after prolonged con- templation of them, suggestions of their multiple relations, and the knowledge which was at first simply picturesque becomes, sooner or later, scien- tific. The mental power which arrives at this is largely innate, and beyond the capacity of any education to bestow. But if any educational method can increase and develop it, it is that which most nearly imitates the spontaneous habits of fertile THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. 49 and original minds, apart from all systematic inten- tion. Three characters are conspicuous in the observa- tion exercised by this class of minds : it is single, it is imaginative, and it is indefinitely prolonged. It is single that is to say, the mind which is powerfully attracted to any object and none ever discovers any thing in any object to which it is not powerfully attracted is in no haste to detach itself and pass on to any thing new; on the contrary, it lingers and hates to go, and delays, and returns again and again to catch still another glimpse of what has been so delightful. To say that an object is suggestive is to say that it constantly opens up new trains of thought, and, so long as this is the case, the mind cannot bear to abandon it. It is on this account that the con- templation is indefinitely prolonged, and irregularly so, according to no fixed rule or extrinsic necessity, not even that of mastering a certain quotum of in- formation, but varies in accordance with the infi- nitely varied accidents of the mental intercourse. Finally, to be fruitful, this intercourse must be imaginative. First, in the lowest and most literal O ' sense of the term, since the mind cannot directly handle the sense-perception of the object, but only the mental image of the object, revived and remem- bered. But, in addition, to detect all its hidden meanings, properties, and possible aspects, many functions of the imagination must be brought into play, and none are useless. Fertility of fancy, rich 50 THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. association of ideas, are as important in collecting the premises for scientific argument as is the argu- ment itself in the discovery of truth. 1 During the pre-scientific period, therefore, either in the history of the race, the development of the individual, or the evolution of any single idea in an inquiring mind, the cardinal necessity is that of fill- ing the mind with an abundance of distinct concepts and visual images of real concrete existences. Any prolonged attempt to compare, generalize, or reason about these should be deferred, under penalty of substituting a mere verbal imitation of reasoning for a real effort of the mind. A certain amount of reasoning and comparison will, of course, arise inci- dentally, but it must be kept subordinate to the main purpose. The soil must be enriched before it is plowed. Ideas must be clustered into dense and rich groups, individualities magnified and intensified, as, to keep to our subject, the flowers which are classified by the botanist may be individually mag- nified into almost conscious beings by the poet. " A nun demure of lowly port, Or sprightly maiden of Love's court, In thy simplicity the sport Of all temptations ; A queen in crown of rubies drest, A starveling in a scanty vest, Are all, as seems to suit thee best, Thy appellations." WORDSWORTH, " To a Daisy." 1 In these respects the mental history of the celebrated Faraday offers a mine of interesting facts and illustrations. THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. 5 1 " While the patient primrose sits Like a beggar in the cold." WORDSWORTH. " Here are sweet-peas on tiptoe for a flight With wings of gentle flush o'er delicate white, And taper fingers catching at all things To bind them all about with tiny rings." KEATS. " Bloomy grapes, laughing from green attire." IBID. " And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest And the hyacinth's purple and white and blue, Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew Of music, so delicate, soft, and intense, It was felt like an odor within the sense." SHELLEY. "... daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty ; violets dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes Or Cytherea's breath." " Winter's Tale." " Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle in the milky way ; . Ten thousand saw I at a glance Tossing their heads in sprightly dance." WORDSWORTH, " The Daffodils." " Daisies, those pearled arcturi of the earth, The constellated flower that never sets." SHELLEY. " The gold-eyed kingcups fine, The frail bluebell peereth over Rare broidery of the purple clover." TENNYSON. 52 THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. 11 Open afresh your round of starry folds, Ye ardent marigolds ! " KEATS. " Death in the wood In the death-pale lips apart, Death, in a whiteness that curdles the blood, Now black to the very heart. To show that life by the spirit comes, She gave us a soulless flower." ELAINE GOODALE, " The Indian Pipe." Hence the suitableness of flowers for making large, forcible, indelible impressions on the imagination and the memory, and for storing the mind at the outset with the most vivid and beautiful conceptions of Nature. The leaf offers, indeed, a variety of beautiful forms and outlines, which are not, however, either so nu- merous or so conspicuous as those displayed by the various organs of the flower. Leaves contrast less conspicuously with one another ; their sensible dif- ferences are much less striking, and the eye of the child is not sufficiently trained to adequately appre- ciate the subtle differences of color which really exist. To him leaves can scarcely fail to present the vast monotony of green which the primitive vegetation of the earth is said to have exhibited before variegated corollas appeared. It is certainly desirable to repeat for the individual mind the experience of the race ; but is it necessary for that to go back to the ages which antedated even the prehistoric man ? THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. 53 In a word, the differences of flowers resemble the " legend writ in large letters " which Plato advised should be first studied ; the differences of leaves make the same legend repeated in the " small let- ters," and therefore more difficult to decipher. 1 4. Miss Youmans's reason derived from botanical systems of classification I scarcely understand. It is very true that classification by the corolla is aban- doned, and indeed never could have been carried very far. But the natural system, which sums up the total characters of the plant, certainly derives a much larger number of its data from the flower than from any other part of the plant. The great function of the plant is reproduction, and around the organs of reproduction contained in the flower centre all its peculiarities. The mutual relations of stamens and pistils have been found inadequate for classification ; but the extension of the class lines has still been chiefly in the direction of other parts of the flower, especially the fruit, ovule, and embryo. Toward the flower converge all the forces of the plant ; it is the culmination, the perfection of the entire vegetable organism. It should therefore be contemplated first, because, as it seems to me, it is eminently desirable that the child should, whenever possible, see the principal thing first ; since whatever comes first is always liable to remain for him the most important. The habit of ranking things in the order of their real relative importance is certainly a 1 " Republic," book ii., 368 (Jowett's translation). 54 THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF, most valuable habit to cultivate, both morally and intellectually. As has already been pointed out, the mind in its growth closely resembles that of a tree ; for it, primary facts constantly tend to become central facts, and due organic proportions are only maintained between ideas when the principal, by being placed first, is enabled to become really cen- tral, a vitalized centre of fitly organized knowledge. For all life develops from centres ; and in Nature there are no single lines. 5. Miss Youmans's final proposition, that progress must always be made from the simple to the com- plex, is the one with which I do most decidedly disagree. The expression itself is ambiguous : for it may mean the transition from the easy to the difficult ; or it may mean the study of elements as a preliminary to the study of the compounds into which they enter. In the latter meaning, the propo- sition cannot surely be applied to the leaf and the flower. Morphologically speaking, it is true that all the parts of the flower result from transformations of the leaf, but this fact is altogether too recondite for a child's appreciation. In no other sense can the leaf be said to enter into the flower as an element to be a " simpler " part of it. No knowledge to be gained of the flower, other than these facts of em- bryology, pre-supposes or requires knowledge of the leaf. Study of the one can only be said to prepare for the other by the degree of mental discipline it affords. And the very question at issue is, What is THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. 55 the best for mental discipline, the contemplation of objects with the fewer and less obvious characters, or of objects at once more conspicuous, and more abounding in interesting details ? I have already stated the reasons which seem to me to justify the selection of the second method. The first seems endorsed, and perhaps is intended to be so, by the Comtist classification of the sciences, and by the rather arbitrary attempt of its author to identify this with the actual order of their historic evolution. As regards their subject-matter, it would certainly be untrue to assert that this attracted the attention of mankind in the order of its (philosophi- cally considered) simplicity. 1 At what appear to us to be the opening periods of Greek thought we find already co-existing the germs of all the six funda- mental sciences, if we may assume that even chemis- try was foreshadowed in the doctrines of the Four Elements. Such co-existence was inevitable, for the moment that the human mind was aroused enough to observe and theorize about any thing, its attention could not fail to be attracted in several different 1 " While he [Comte] asserts that the rational order of the sciences, like the order of their historic development, ' is determined by the degree of simplicity, or, what comes to the same thing, of generality of their phe- nomena,' it might, contrariwise, be asserted that, commencing with the complex and the special, mankind have progressed step by step to a knowl- edge of greater simplicity and wider generality." SPENCER, " The Genesis of Science." Mr. Spencer goes on to quote a remark of Whewell's that " the reader has already repeatedly seen in the course of this history complex and deriva- tive principles [read ' objects '] presenting themselves to men's minds before simple and elementary ones." 56 THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. directions simultaneously. It noticed the form and number of objects, and founded the sciences of geometry and arithmetic. But it was quite unaware that these sciences deal with simpler elements than make up human organisms, and believed that physi- ology and medicine are far simpler subjects, and far less involved in sublime mysteries, than are mathe- matics. All subjects were studied, or at least specu- lated upon, in no other order than that of their apparent nearness to human interests and that of the obviousness of their phenomena. 1 Exactly the same is true for every individual mind, whose perceptions are not regularly successive, but simultaneous, and are as liable to be attracted toward infinitely complex objects as toward the simplest details. It is true, as has been pointed out in the " Experiment," that a child's first perceptions are necessarily of form and color, and the ideas of form belong to mathematics. But color is a physical property of bodies, and therefore the subject of a science which is, according to the Comtist measure of simplicity, two degrees removed from mathematics. On the other hand, the property of number, although, like forms, mathematical, is not grasped till long after color and many other physical properties have been appreciated. Other properties of bodies become known in direct 1 " The broad distinction between the two orders of knowledge [the ordinary and the scientific] is not in their nature, but in their remoteness from perception." SPENCER, loc. cit. THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. 57 proportion to their obviousness, and to their acciden- tal impact on the senses, or to their association with the personal experience of the child. These may be mathematical, physical, biological, or even social. The mind of the child, like that of the race, looks over the surface of all things at once ; its progress is not from the simple toward the complex, but from the superficial and obvious toward the profound and hidden. The mutual aid rendered by sciences, when, to use Herbert Spencer's expression, they be- come arts to one another, is only required after the observation and registration of accessible facts are completed, and when analysis is required to bring to light new facts or to explain others. But the child's mind does not reach this stage, and it is either illusory or fatal to attempt to force it prematurely. It is very interesting to notice, by study of the actual evolution of knowledge, what a large amount of knowledge was obtained simultaneously in each department by independent observation, and before the necessity for mutual help, other than that derived from elementary mathematics, had been perceived. During this period the advance was made in each science, not by deductions from some simpler science, but by observations and methods peculiar to itself. Thus, as already, stated, the germs of mathematics, physics, biology, and sociology, are all found co-exist- ing at what seems to us the opening periods of Greek thought ; nor was their degree of development at all proportioned to their degree of simplicity. If some 58 THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. truths of geometry and arithmetic were really estab- lished, so, in spite of the obscurity surrounding biological laws, were many phenomena of living beings also observed. The pulse was known, if the circulation was not, and numerous are the clinical observations of Hippocrates which still hold good even in the scientific sphere of prognosis ; and who could deny the permanent value of many of the ethical, political, and historical speculations of the ages of Plato, Thucydides, and Aristotle, even though, according to the Comtist doctrine, sociologi- cal speculations should have been valueless at this time, because entirely premature ? T The epoch of acquisition of facts, which must precede the discovery of their laws, often stretches over long periods of time periods which interest us, because corresponding to the moment of education with which this discussion is concerned. The labors of the alchemists accumulated immense material on the composition of bodies and on their more recondite properties long before the scientific relations of chem- istry could be established through the law of definite proportions. Physiology, the most complex of the physical sciences, has been most heterogeneous in 1 " What has often led linguists to regard the elementary monosyllabism of the Chinese as the primitive condition of all languages is the tendency which leads us to consider simplicity as indicating a state of infancy, or, at least, as the sign of a high antiquity. But this is an error. The Chinese language, though monosyllabic, has served a highly developed civilization ; on the other hand, the languages of the savages of America, of Central and Southern Africa, offer a surprising richness of grammatical forms." Renan, " De 1'Origine du Langage," p. 13 of preface. THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. 59 the methods by which it has established its funda- mental facts. The nature of respiration was, indeed, established by a chemist, from chemical data and from, chemical experiments. But the nature of the circulation was partly inferred from anatomical facts the presence of valves in veins, partly demon- strated by vivisection, a method of investigation which could not possibly be suggested by any other science than physiology. Knowledge of physics has materially assisted the interpretation of blood-pres- sure, of the expansion of the lungs, and many other phenomena, first . known by direct observation of them. But the demonstration of the functions of the nervous system has been made exclusively by means of physiological experiment and clinical observation. " Science," observes Renan, " in order to formulate her laws, is obliged to make abstractions and to create simple circumstances, such as Nature never presents." ' This is done usually with the aid of a simpler science, or one of wider generality, whose mastery thus becomes indispensable to further progress. But, until the moment for analysis and experiment has arrived, observation of the complex object is not more, but rather less difficult than that of the simple one, because in it so many varieties of details offer themselves spontaneously to the atten- tion that the mind is at once fully occupied so soon as it begins to carefully observe ; whereas pure observation soon exhausts the details of a simple 1 Loc. at., p. 59. 6o THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. object or phenomenon, and no further progress can be made until after a profound analysis has plunged below the surface. Let any one compare the rate of progress in the discovery of new knowledge in mathematics, astronomy, and e\ T en physics, with that of its incessant registration in chemistry and in all the biological sciences, registration often effected, moreover, by a relatively mediocre order of minds. The child, like the race, begins at once with two sets of mental activities sense-impressions, and speculations suggested by them and by emotional experience. Since complex objects are capable of making impressions on its senses, and of suggesting speculation, it is often both possible and profitable to study the external and perceptible characters of these objects, as well as those of simpler ones. The child, like the infant humanity, is incapable of profound analysis, and a premature habit of analysis is morally destructive. 1 It is this very incapacity which makes the complexity of objects a matter of indifference, since it is only by analysis that the difference between simple and complex objects can be recognized or felt. Whatever makes a large im- pression upon the senses is, other things being equal, easy of apprehension, even when not of comprehen- sion. "Whatever does not do so, whatever demands the intervention of abstract reasoning and inference, 1 The effect of this is shown in the autobiography of John Stuart Mill, as the author himself points out in a striking chapter. THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. 6 1 is difficult often so difficult as to be really impossi- ble even though the child pretend and appear to understand. And thus, to return to our starting-point, it is for all of these reasons that I have preferred to intro- duce the world of plants by the flower, with its marvelous variety in form and color, in port and expression and inflorescence, in contrivance of petal and stamen and pistil, and in manifold destiny of fruit. I would, undoubtedly, and in accordance with the principle already laid down of indicating many things on the mental horizon before the time should arrive for paying systematic attention to them, bring forward a few salient leaves as types : the needles of the pine, the rounded floating leaves of the water- lily, the truncated leaves of the tulip-tree, the five- fingered leaves of the maple, the pinnated leaves of the sumach, the asymmetrical leaves of the begonia, the woolly leaves of the mullein. But I should reserve the systematic study of u hundreds of speci- mens " to a much later period, and then enter upon it with all possible enthusiasm, and prepared to espe- cially consider the numerous mathematical relations presented by these exquisite organic forms. Not only through study of their geometric outline, but in their multiple arithmetic combinations of insertion and section, may the pupil be led to the fruitful modern methods which involve the application of mathe- matics to the non-mathematical sciences. 1 1 See " Etudes comparees des Feuilles," par M. Fertnond, 1864. IV. THE PLACE FOE THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE IN A CUR- RICULUM OF EDUCATION. I. The study of language has always occupied a con- spicuous place in educational curricula. The Greeks, who counted all languages but their own barbarian, taught the grammar of their own as the basis of all education. The Roman children studied Greek as ours do French less as an education than as a fashion. The first mediaeval schools established grammar in the triviuni, or most elementary course, and also in the quadrivium. The feeling has always prevailed in civilized communities, that as the mind was never seen to work without language, the study of language must lie at the basis of all mental training. We know now that much mental action precedes the use of words, and whenever we are logical to the laws of mental development, we train the mind to handle sense perceptions of external objects before we introduce the systematic study of language, even in reading and writing the mother tongue. Every one knows, however, that this change in the school curriculum is most recent. The moment arrives at last when the study of lan- 62 THE PLACE FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE. 63 guage must begin, even if nothing is learned but the native language of the child. This moment may to a certain extent be compared with that illustrious epoch in European history, when at the Renaissance of learn- ing, classical Latin and Greek were rediscovered for the modern world. The extraordinary effect of this discovery may well serve to prove the impor- tance of language to thought. With an imperfect and inadequate language, the nations of Northern Europe had remained in a narrow, cramped, and as we now often say, with perhaps considerable exag- geration, a barbarous existence. Restored to the noble speech of which they were the just inheritors, their compressed life rapidly expanded to its measure. The new vitalities aroused, soon in turn expanded the hidden potentialities of the antique tongues to all the flexible and varied needs of the modern life, and this life rapidly developed to a hitherto unknown degree of complexity. An immense 'number of thoughts seemed to have been impossible from the lack of fitting words. When these words were found the buried treasure of by-gone ancestors, the thoughts sprang to them as rider to the saddle ; and with new ideas, life was regenerated. Thus, although the material for the physical sci- ences existed in the same abundance then as now, these sciences failed to develop until after the Re- naissance of classical learning. It seemed necessary that Scaliger and Erasmus, in the sixteenth century, should precede Gilbert and Harvey in the seven- 64 THE PLACE FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE. teenth, to render possible their discoveries of elec- tricity and of the circulation of the blood. The solitary labors of Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century had flickered like a taper in a vast cavern of darkness, and then failed for lack of air. The hu- man brain could not advance in analysis of the exter- nal world until it had been disciplined and developed in its internal activity by training in language. But, at the present day, the educational value of the study of languages has begun to be seriously questioned. In a late number of the Forum Dr. Flint declares that as much mental discipline can be obtained from study of physics and chemistry as from study of languages, and that the knowledge thus gained is both more useful and more easily O %/ understood than the construction of Latin and Greek. He also observes that the range of sub- jects on which knowledge is desirable has greatly widened since the classical curricula were planned, and that it is impossible to do justice to all that is necessary to-day if we continue to fulfil all the de- mands which were made two hundred years ago. Similar remarks are repeated over and over again, and on all sides. These assertions touch, indeed, upon some truth, but they do not comprehend all of it, and they overlook much that is essential to the ques- tions at issue. The problems to be considered are : 1. Does the study of language exercise any differ- ent effect upon mental development from the study of any other subject, and if so, what is it ? 2. How does the effect of language study compare THE PLACE FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE. 65 with that of mathematics, of the physical sciences, of the moral and historical sciences ? 3. If such special effect can be proved, at what age or epoch of education is it most appropriate and useful to seek for it ? 4. Is there any difference between the effect on the brain of the classic and the modern languages ? 5. If languages are to be taught, how is the neces- sary time to be secured for teaching other things most important to know and too often neglected ? 6. What proportion should these relative branches of study bear to each other in a general, non-special- ized curriculum ? 7. What special devices or methods may be sug- gested to facilitate the accomplishment of the above- mentioned ends ? At the outset I would call attention to a fact which might seem self-evident, yet is generally overlooked in pedagogical discussions of the subject. This is, that the study of languages must be an extension, more or less complex, of the process of acquiring language the highest physiological acquisition that distinguishes the human race from the lower animals. The method and educational results of such study are, therefore, primarily a physiological problem, and should be discussed by physiologists before they are handed over to pedagogues. The genesis of speech is one of the most extraordi- nary and mysterious phenomena in the history of mankind. It has always justly excited the astonish- ment and speculations of philosophers. 66 THE PLACE FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE. It is most difficult to understand why any particular sound, or group of sounds, should have become sig- nificant of one object or idea rather than of any other. A purely physiological theory has tried to classify all words according to the parts of the articulating apparatus at which their fundamental sounds are formed, thus giving one intrinsic meaning to guttural sounds, another to labials, another to dentals, etc. But this theory cannot meet all the facts of the case. Prof. Max Mueller, who traces all words in the Indo- European languages back to 850 primary Sanscrit roots, is inclined to accept another physiological explanation of the genesis of the roots. This is the theory of Noire. The latter has pointed out that whenever a number of people are engaged together in any muscular work, they have a tendency to utter aloud certain rhythmical sounds. " These are almost involuntary vibrations of the voice, corresponding to the more or less regular movements of the whole bodily frame." Noire suggests that some special nerve element, or group of nerve elements, in the brain is then thrown into vibration coincidently with the external muscular movement ; and this associated nerve vibration being propagated to the part of the brain which innervates the organs of articulation, the latter are excited to so modulate the simultaneously developed current of air in expiration, that a definite sound, one of the primitive root sounds, is produced. This verbal root remains associated with the act which was being performed during its articulation, THE PLACE FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE. 67 and finally becomes an expressive sign for the entire class of acts during which it is habitually repeated. " Thus would be explained," observes Mueller, " the fact that the primitive Sanscrit roots all express ac- tions and not objects : as actions of digging, cutting, rubbing," etc. Words expressive of other ideas are derived from the first by analogy and metaphor. This theory should also explain" why any given root should bear a special relation to any given action, and hence come to express any special group of ideas. It does so, because it has been generated in a cere- bral excitation, that has happened to coincide with such other cerebral excitations as have been necessary to the performance of voluntary muscular actions. Thus, in the figure, Ar. C. is placed on a part of the brain that we know is always excited when a person is using his right arm ; S. C., on a point very near it, which is always excited when he is speaking. Nerve impulses pass from this point down through the brain until they reach the nerves coming from the base of it, and which go to the throat, tongue, palate, and lips. According to the theory, the exci- tation or vibration of nerve elements at the point Ar. C. spreads to point S. C., the so-called centre of articulation, where it throws nerve cells into some special form of vibration. This special form of vibra- tion is transmitted out of the brain, along nerves going to the lips and other organs of articulation, and the current of air which is at the moment issuing from them is moulded into some special articulate 68 THE PLACE FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE. sound. This becomes a root, an auditory sign, which, first evolved (according to the hypothesis) during the performance of a given act, is repeated with every repetition of the act, and gradually be- comes an abstract sign corresponding to the gen- eralized conception of such a class of acts. Thus \ IV. C. writing centre, S. C. speech centre, M. C. motor centre for lips, Ar. C. arm centre, C. C. concept centre (location hypothetical), A. C. auditory centre, V. C. visual centre. the first abstraction of speech would result from a generalized experience of a succession of personal ac- tions. In the second stage of development, the sign would be extended by analogy to other actions than the original one ; finally to the properties of objects THE PLACE FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE. 69 that seemed explicable by reference to these actions, which were better known than the objects themselves. Thus, observes Mueller, every root expresses a concept or general notion, or, more correctly, the remembered consciousness of repeated acts, as scrap- ing, digging, striking, joining, etc. 1 As a single illustration. From a root lehan, to dig, easily came khana, meaning not only a digger, but also a hole ; and Jcliani, a digger and a mine. I will not dwell on the various interesting facts which might be adduced in support of this theory. But, in considering it, we are led to note the funda- mental circumstance that speech implies a more ex- tensive excitation of the brain than does any action performed without speech, including in the latter the systematized thinking which clothes itself in words. In its most rudimentary form, the articulate utter- ance accompanying a muscular movement implies that nervous action has spread from the nerve centres governing the movements of limbs, to those adjacent centres which control the organs of articu- lation. Closely adjacent to these centres are other portions of the brain which have no immediate connection with nerves either going to or coming from the brain. The Island of E-eil is one of them. These portions of the brain are concomitantly drawn into the vortex of excitement, and when that is the case, the vibrations of nerve cells and fibres which occur during the utterance of the speech, are re- 1 " The Science of Thought," p. 214. 7O THE PLACE FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE. peated or registered, as it is said, in these extra- sensory centres. It is then, in some mysterious way, that the consciousness or conception of speech is generated in the brain and mind of the speaking individual. The genesis does not occur unless the supra-sensual, superadded convolutions of the brain have attained a high degree of development, and this is why no animal but man is able to speak. 1 When any one learns the terms of a fully devel- oped speech,