it being always remembered in regard to the former that their object is not to make the boy or girl an archaeologist, but simply to act as an aid to the imagination and enable it to realise what ancient civilisation was like. A good modern fancy sketch may often be more instructive from this point of view than a cut taken from a dictionary of antiquities.
The method which I advocate is, therefore, on its linguistic side, analogous in some respects to the so-called “natural method” or to the method by which an adult, left to his own resources, usually attempts to master a foreign tongue. He begins by attacking some easy book or newspaper, with the help of a dictionary, and he picks up the grammar as he goes along. The method is in both cases heuretic, in so far as the learner does not try to reconstruct the language out of the grammar, as a palaeontologist reconstructs an extinct animal from a study of a few bones. But in the one case the learner works on a text which presents all the variety and complexity of nature; in the other, on a text which has been simplified and systematised by art, so as to lead directly to a clear view of certain fundamental grammatical facts. Granted the premises, I conceive that there will be no great difficulty in accepting the conclusion; for there can hardly be a better method of teaching a language than that which combines the systematic order of the grammar with the interest and life of the story-book. The crux of the situation is to write such a school book; and though it may be long before an ideal book of the kind is produced, the problem ought not to be impossible of solution, if once the necessity of a solution from the teaching point of view is realised. On the one hand the ideal book ought to have a sustained interest, and if possible to form a continuous narrative from beginning to end; otherwise much of the effect is lost; this adds materially to the difficulty of writing. On the other hand there are various considerations which lighten the task. The writer has before him an infinite variety of choice in regard to his subject matter; and
