240 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
hotel porter or the cicerone of a Cook’s tourist party, not an educated 
man. Glibness, in one tongue or many, may coexist with intellectual 
ndigence. 
As to the method, it is by no means clear that the method of the child 
s the method natural for an adult. The man who has made $10.000 
Joes not make the second $10,000 in the same way. 
The child has no other way to acquire than by imitation, and by units. 
But he who knows one language is a hundred per ¢ent. better off than the 
infant, as regards learning another. 
Part of the new language needs only to be recognized as being part also 
of his own ; and in adding what is foreign he can profit, as a child cannot, 
oy generalizations, and find in his study a far higher sort of mental 
2xercise. 
The object of modern language study in our schools is mental discipline 
and reflex benefit to English, and such knowledge of German and French 
as all cultured people desire, satisfying the scholarly temper that would 
aot willingly be ignorant of the speech, the history, or the institutions of 
shose great nations. It is desirable and feasible to give such facility in 
reading these languages as will serve the needs of men who find the work 
of their professional brethren in France and Germany only in mono- 
graphs and periodicals never translated ; also, to furnish those who may 
desire to perfect their knowledge of these tongues with a good foundation 
‘or their study. Cultured Americans find such use for a reading knowl- 
adge of French and German, that their school attainments in this direc- 
son less often than most other studies sink into utter desunetude. 
All our purposes will be served if Latin furnish the basis of grammati- 
cal science, and subsequent studies follow the comparative method. 
Narrative of the school course exemplifying these ideas stopped at the 
point where Latin had been taught a year or more, and English, Greek, 
German, or French might be introduced, because then the question 
assigned was answered. But the shortening and enriching of the school 
course that results in the years following are the best justification of the 
plan. 
To read the Greek grammar with a class of beginners, marking one 
passage-to be memorized or referred to, because it contains something 
peculiar to Greek; marking the next as already learned, inasmuch as it 
sets forth a principle familiar in English or Latin, discovers to them the 
gratifying truth, to which they are entitled, that even in beginning they 
<now considerable Greek, and wonderfully adds to their zest. 
To show a class beginning German: that, like Latin, it has grammatical 
gender and inflects its adjectives; like English, it makes large use of 
auxiliaries, and relies much upon the order of words to express its meaning, 
is to employ pupils in a higher sort of thinking than characterizes the 
asual beginnings in languages.