Here the object system has made the greatest advance. The English language has the unfortunate peculiarity of a great many sounds to each vowel, and of an utter want of connection between the name and the sound of the letter. No mature mind can easily appreciate the dark and mysterious gulf which, to the infant's view, separates the learning the letters and reading. The two seem to be utterly different acquirements. The new methods escape the difficulty in part by not teaching the names, but the sounds, of the letters first, and then leading the child to put his sounds together in the form of a word, and next to print the word on the black-board, the teacher calling on the scholar to find a similar one in a card or book. By this ingenious device, the modern infant, instead of being whipped into reading, is beguiled into it pleasantly and imperceptibly, and makes his progress by a philosophical law. He reads before he knows it. But here the obstacle arises that each vowel, printed in the same type, has so many sounds. One ingenious teacher. Dr. Leigh, obviates this by printing on his charts each vowel-sound in a slightly different form, and giving the silent letters in hair-lines. The objection here might be that the scholar learns a type different from that in common use. Still, the deviation from the ordinary alphabet is so slight as probably not to confuse any young mind, and the learner can go on by a philosophical classification of sounds. Other teachers indicate the different vowel-sounds by accents. One well-known writer on the "Object System," Mr. Caulkins, seems to approve of what we are inclined to consider even more philosophical still--the learning the word first, and the letters and spelling afterward. Most children in cultivated families learn to read in this way. The word is a symbol of thought--a thing in itself--first, perhaps, connected with a picture of the object placed at its side, but afterward becoming phonetic, representing arbitrarily any object by its sound. Then other words are learned--not separately, but in association, as one learns a foreign language. Farther on, the pupil analyzes, spells, considers each letter, and notes each part of speech. An objection may occur here, that the habit of correct and careful spelling will not be so well gained by this method as by the old. Mr. Caulkins's remarks on this topic in his Manual on "Object Lessons" are so sensible that we quote them _in extenso:--_ THE A B C METHOD.