=Ratich’s Methods.=--Ratich (1571-1635) probably became acquainted with the sense realism of Bacon while studying in England, and, when about forty years of age, undertook to found a system of education upon it. In linguistic training, like all realists, he insisted that one “should first study the vernacular” as an introduction to other languages. He also held to the principle of “one thing at a time and often repeated.” By this he meant that, in studying a language, one should master a single book before taking up another. In his teaching at Köthen, as soon as his pupils knew their letters, they were required to learn _Genesis_ thoroughly for the sake of their German. Each chapter was read twice by the teacher, while the pupil followed the text with his finger. When the pupils could read the book perfectly, they were taught grammar from it as a text. The teacher pointed out the various parts of speech and made the boys find other examples, and had them decline, conjugate, and parse. In taking up Latin, a play of Terence was treated in similar fashion. Others of the principles that he used in teaching language and grammar, and especially those which applied to education in general, were even more distinctly realistic. Such, for example, were his precepts,--“follow the order of nature” and “everything by experiment and induction,” and his additional recommendation that “nothing is to be learned by rote.” Thus Ratich not only helped shape some of the best methods for teaching languages, but anticipated the main principles of modern pedagogy. While, owing to obtrusive failings in character and experience, he was uniformly unsuccessful in his practice, he, nevertheless, stirred up considerable thought and stimulated many treatises of others. Thus, through Comenius, who carried out his principles more fully, this German innovator, impractical as he was, became a spiritual ancestor to Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Herbart. [Sidenote: Education,] [Sidenote: wanderings,] [Sidenote: and achievements.] =Comenius: His Training and Work.=--John Amos Comenius (1592-1670) was born at Nivnitz, Moravia, and was by religious inheritance a staunch adherent of the Moravian Church. After a course in a Latin school, he spent a couple of years in higher education at the Lutheran College of Herborn and at the University of Heidelberg. In consequence of many vicissitudes in life, he lived and wrote in a number of places, and became acquainted with the work of a variety of men engaged in educational reform and advancement. While the problems with which they were dealing were similar to his own and largely influenced his educational positions, he far surpassed them all in scope of work and greatness of repute. His educational achievements were the outgrowth of sense realism, and appear in three directions:--(1) the series of texts for learning Latin; (2) his _Great Didactic_; and (3) his attempts to create an encyclopædic organization of knowledge (_pansophia_).