entleman was able to bear testimony to the merit of Mr. Rodger's system
because by it he had learnt to do both. Of course his testimony rested
on one assumption. It assumed that having gone through Otto's Grammar
all learnt from it had been forgotten, and that the whole merit of his
success was due to Mr. Rodger's method.

Mr. Rodger was of opinion, that foreign languages should be learnt as a
child learns its mother tongue. It seemed to me a strange use to make of
the reason and intelligence of the adult, to cast it aside as useless and
to ask the youth and man to become a child again. It appeared to me the
most wasteful of methods. Is language a science, and if so, what would
be thought of a similar proposal for acquiring any other science? But
are the cases parallel? Is there any similarity of circumstance? Can
the youth and man again place themselves in the circumstances of the
child?

The child is constantly hearing the language spoken, everyone around it
is teaching it to speak, everything around it stimulates it to do so.
Nearly everything it learns, comes to it through its mother tongue; at
play it hears, it speaks. At five years of age it begins to go to
school, and from that time until its fourteenth or sixteenth year,
whatever else it studies, it must study its mother tongue. All other
knowledge reaches it through this medium. Every other study compels the
study and practice of its mother tongue and allowing ten hours per day
for sleep, by the time it is fourteen years of age seventy-one thousand
six hundred hours have been spent in such study and practice.

Let us take the case of the youth or man who commences the study of a
foreign language. He has found that a foreign language will be of use to
him or has become necessary to him in his work. He begins to study it
and takes the usual one lesson per week of one hour's duration. In a
year he has spent fifty hours with the teacher; if he devoted two or
three hours weekly to the preparation of each lesson, he will have spent
150 to 200 hours per annum upon it, or, less absences and omissions,
perhaps 140 or 180 hours upon its study. This makes fourteen days of ten
hours or perhaps three weeks as against fourteen years spent by the child
upon its mother tongue. Multiply this amount of fourteen days by two or
three, and grammar is still seen by comparison to have accomplished a
stupendous miracle. But even this disparity is not complete, for wh