Note I — MORAL CULTURE OF INFANCY.

All these difficulties with which I wrestled so many years in my character of champion of childhood, are entirely solved and done away with by the more recently introduced method,—introduced by authority of a distinguished philologist, of teaching the Italian alphabet, and always calling c and g hard, as the old Romans are supposed to have done. This mode is made practicable in the "First Nursery Reading-Book," and the last edition of the "Primer of Reading and Drawing." Abundant experience shows that reading taught in this way leaves nothing to be unlearned in English, and teaches an analysis of words into letters which contributes very much to the ease of the subsequent study of European languages, to which the sounds of the letters of the Italian alphabet apply almost without an exception. Experience upon this subject has given me confidence in the general rule of never teaching exceptions to anything until the rule is well understood and mastered.