substituted for sight in nearly
everything that relates to recorded information, to learning, and to
educational work. By that means the organ of hearing will be restored
to its rightful office. Enlightenment and instruction of all kinds
will be given by means of phonographic books. The sound-wave will, in
a word, be substituted for the light-wave as the vehicle of all our
best information and intercourse. The ear will have habitually taken
the place of the eye in the principal offices of interest and
information.

The unnatural method of the book--the visible book instead of the
audible book--will then be done away. Nature, who instructs the child
by sound, will continue to teach the man in the same manner. All
mothers, from the mother bird to the mother woman, begin the teaching
of their offspring by sound, by utterance. The mother bird continues
in this manner; but the mother woman is presently supplanted by a
teacher who comes in with a printed book filled with crooked marks,
and would have it that learning must be _thus_ acquired. Instead of
continuing the natural process of instruction to the complete
development and information of the mind, an abnormal method has been
adopted by mankind with many hurtful consequences.

The youth at a certain age is led into the world of science, and there
dismissed from the mother-method, to acquire, if he can, the painful
and tedious use of meaningless hieroglyphics. There he must study with
the eye, learning as best he may the significance of the crooked signs
which can at the most signify no more than words. How much of human
energy and life and thought have been thus wasted in the instruction
of the mind by characters and symbols. The eyes of mankind have, as we
said, been dimmed and shadowed, and at the same time the faculties
have been overheated and the equipose of perception and memory
seriously disturbed by this unnatural process of learning.

Human beings begin the acquirement of knowledge with words, and they
end with words; but an unnatural civilization has taught man to walk
the greater part of his intellectual journey by means of arbitrary
systems of writing and printing. When the next Columbian Year arrives
we shall see him untaught (a hard thing withal) and retaught on
nature's plan of learning. Nature teaches language by sound only.
Artificiality writes a scrawl. Nature's book is a book of words. Man's
book is as yet a book of signs and symbols. Nature's book