by observing their use. A boy, for instance, reads this sentence. "The drug was very _efficacious_." If the word is quite new to him, and there is nothing in the clause preceding or following to indicate its meaning, it is not at all unlikely that he may suppose it to mean "poisonous." If, however, from the context, he finds that a person who had been sick, was made suddenly well, and this statement followed by the remark, that "the drug was very _efficacious_," he will probably get the idea that the word means "healing," or "curative." He reads again, in another place, that a certain mode of teaching penmanship was found to be very "efficacious." Here is a new use of the word, quite different from the other, and he is obliged to exclude from his idea of its meaning every thing like "healing." So he goes on, every fresh example cutting off some extraneous idea which the previous examples had led him to attach to the word, and every step onward coming nearer to the general idea, though he may never express it in words, of something which accomplished its object, whatever that object may be. It is, I believe, chiefly by observing in this way the manner in which words are used, that children do and must learn their meaning. It is, in other words, by quickening and cultivating the habit of attention to the meaning,--by training a child, when he is reading, to imagine, not that he is reading the words, but that he is reading the sense, by accustoming him to look through the word, to the sense, just as he would look at objects out of doors through the window, and to consider the words, as he would consider the glass, merely as a medium, through which, and unmindful of it, he looks at something beyond,--_which something is the meaning_. Let me not be misunderstood in regard to this matter of definitions. I believe it to be of the utmost importance that children should be constantly required to give definitions or explanations of the words whose meaning they have acquired. All I mean to call in question is, whether that meaning to any considerable extent is acquired by committing to memory formal definitions prepared by others. When they have once learned the meaning of a word, which is to be done mainly, if not only, by observing its use, then by all means let them be required to express that meaning by other words which they know. Such an exercise cannot be too much insisted on. It is one of the best means of securing that attention to the signification of words, which is so much wanted. It requires the child, moreover, to bring his knowledge continually to the test. It cultivates at once accuracy of thought, and accuracy of language, which is the vehicle of thought. Train a child, therefore, to the habit of attention, first to the meaning of words as gathered from observation of their use, and secondly to the expression of that meaning in language appropriate and intelligible to others.