Note 61 — IX. RATICHIUS. (1571-1635.)

The ordinary teaching of almost every subject offers illustrations of the neglect of this principle. Take, e.g., the way in which children are usually taught to read. First, they have to say the alphabet—a very easy task as it seems to us, but if we met with a strange word of twenty-six syllables, and that not a compound word, but one of which every syllable was new to us, we might have some difficulty in remembering it. And yet such a word would be to us what the alphabet is to a child. When he can perform this feat, he is next required to learn the visual symbols of the sounds and to connect these with the vocal symbols. Some of the vocal symbols bring the child in contact with the sound itself, but most are simply conventional. What notion does the child get of the aspirate from the name of the letter h? Having learnt twenty-six visual and twenty-six vocal symbols, and connected them together, the child finally comes to the sounds (over 40 in number) which the symbols are supposed to represent.