are
different owe both the love for reading and the ability in this art to
other causes.

"The pupils learned to love reading, and became able to read well, in
spite of poor teaching during their first lessons. There is consolation
in believing that this method, which produced so many halting, stumbling
readers, is now abandoned by all good teachers of reading. May the
number of such teachers be greatly increased.

* * * * * *

"The 'word method' begins at once with teaching the words in a manner
similar to that by which children learn to distinguish one object from
another, and learn the names. It proposes to teach words as the signs of
things, acts, and qualities, etc. It does not propose to teach children
the alphabet, but to leave them to learn this after they have become
familiar with enough words to commence reading."

The Object System teaches geography very ingeniously. The pupil begins
by getting into his mind the idea of a map. This is by no means so
simple an idea as might be supposed, as witness the impossibility almost
of making a savage understand it. The child is first told to point to
the different points of the compass; then he marks them down on a
blackboard; next he draws a plan of the room, and each scholar attempts
to locate an object on the plan, and is corrected by the school, if
wrong. Next comes a plan of the district or town; then a globe is shown,
and the idea of position on the globe given, and of the outlines of
different countries. Soon the pupil learns to draw maps on the board,
and to place rivers, bays, lakes, and oceans. The book-questions now to
be presented will not be on purely political geography or merely
arbitrary lists of names. The child is taken on imaginary journeys up
rivers, over mountains, by railroads, and must describe from the lesson
he has learned the different productions, the animals, the character of
the scenery, the vegetation, and the occupations of the people. Thus
geography becomes a kind of natural science, deeply interesting to the
pupil, and touching his imagination. Certain dry geographical names are
forever after associated in his mind with certain animals and plants and
a peculiar scenery.

Natural history is also taught in this system, but not by the usual dry
method. The teacher brings in a potato, for instance, and carries the
pupil along by questions through all its growth and development. Or she
takes fl