the fact remains that the pupils are taught to
read, which fact cannot be gainsaid. If a
soldier who has learned to read in winter
discontinues his readings in summer, he will only
experience what is common to us all—the
weakening of an acquired faculty for want of
practice. Our mental, are subject to the same
law as our material treasures. Things that are
laid up in holes and corners, moth and rust
will surely corrupt. The practical rule, therefore,
to be insisted on is, that the quicker the
faculty of reading is acquired, the more
perseveringly must the learner exercise it. He
must continually practise gymnastics with his
mind as well as with his body. When the
Romans spoke of a raw and ignorant soldier,
they said "Nec legit, nec natat"—"He neither
knows how to read nor to swim."

The adaptation of these systems to the
English language, however possible, is a task which
can hardly be worked out on the present
occasion. Meanwhile, the reader who wishes to
know more of them will do well to consult the
treatises themselves. There is the famous
Méthode Lafforienne, for teaching people to
read in a few hours; there is La Citolégie,
Nouveau Maître de Lecture, nineteenth
edition, for the use of mothers of families, by
Hippolite Auguste Dupont, schoolmaster and
Chevalier of the Legion of Honour—a system
classed the first by the university; and there is
the Méthode Militaire d'Enseignement
Primaire, by Etienne Roland, adopted for the
Army in 1840 by the Minister of War.

One distinguished promoter of education, M.
Auguste Grosselin (Short–hand Reviser to the
Corps Legislatif, and Member of the Administrative
Council of the Central Society for Supporting
and Teaching the Deaf and Dumb in France),
has undertaken a mission of double difficulty.
He proposes to make learning to read, easy and
attractive, and he employs a method which
permits deaf and dumb pupils to be taught
simultaneously with others who can hear and speak.

For making his teachings attractive, he gives
the reason that, although instructors of childhood
are entrusted with an office of extreme
importance and utility, it is not uncommon to
see the task despised by the very persons who
ought to be proud of fulfilling it. Whence can
this unhappy frame of mind arise but from
weariness and disgust with the act of teaching?
And whence arises the master's distaste for
teaching but from the distaste for learning
manifested by the pupil? Right–minded people
do not willingly make themselves the
persecutors of little children; and nothing is more
painful than to be incessantly compelled to
scold and punish, in order to overcome
repugnance or resistance to the learning of a
tiresome lesson. When, on the contrary, the
pupil desires the lesson with impatience, and
receives it with delight, the master derives equal
pleasure and gratification from giving it. "To
instruct by amusing," ought therefore to be the
motto of every teacher of early childhood. He
must gently attract his scholars to the taste
for, and the habit of, work. M. Grosselin
effects that object by his Méthode
Phonomimique, or Plan of associating Vocal Sounds
with Imitative Gestures. Of its successful
employment there can be no doubt. Children
have been taught to read in forty lessons of
only one quarter of an hour each—in a total
of ten hours! In ordinary schools, the
process of learning to read is often dragged
over several months, and is only imperfectly
effected at last.

His first step, therefore, was to compose a
phonomimic alphabet for the joint use of deaf–
dumb and of hearing–speaking pupils. He
composed it by reasoning thus:

The sounds which serve as the elements of
speech may be considered as so many
onomatopœas. An onomatopœa is a rhetorical
figure, when a word is made to imitate the
sound of a thing; as "boom!" for the firing of
a cannon. "Cuckoo" is an onomatopœa
common to many languages. The elements of
speech, then, are sounds imitating sometimes the
exclamations by which man expresses the sudden
emotions of his soul, sometimes the cries of
certain animals, sometimes the sounds of
certain natural phenomena. Coincident with the
onomatopœas of sound, there are veritable
onomatopœas of gesture; and, by accompanying
speech with gesture, we render our thought
more expressive and striking. When a grand
and beautiful spectacle draws from us a cry
of admiration, do we not express the same
sentiment of admiration by raising the hand
to heaven and holding it backward? If, on
the contrary, we experience a feeling of horror,
do we not manifest it by uttering a
different cry, and thrusting our hand forward, as
if to repel the object which meets our view?
Is not the vocal sound by which we impose
silence on an indiscreet chatterer, rendered
more significant by placing our finger on our
lips? In order to represent a bird flying
away, while we imitate with the voice the sound
made by a bird's wings striking the air, do we
not imitate its ascensional movement by a
gesture of the hand?

A certain number of picturesque and natural
ideas may be thus represented, at once by
gestures and the sound of the voice. It is the
reunion of these sounds and the corresponding
gestures which constitutes the phonomimic
alphabet, requiring, however, modification
according to the language it is employed to
convey. It is not a pantomime—not a universal
language of signs.

This alphabet serves as the basis of a process
which, applied to reading, transforms into a
game, a study hitherto considered difficult and
repulsive. Applied to the teaching of deaf–
dumbs, it renders possible their instruction in
company with hearing–speakers.

All that can be done here is to convey an
idea of the thirty–three gestures which make up
the phonomimic alphabet. A gesture accompanying
every sound pronounced by the pupil is the
only innovation introduced into the teaching of