with all the elementary exercises of the intellect:--secondly (from p. 108--to the word 'rock' in p. 114) by matching the difficulties of the learner exactly with his capacity:--thirdly (from p. 114--to the word 'attention' in p. 117) by connecting with the learner's progress the sense of continual success:--fourthly (from p. 117--to the word 'co-operation' in p. 121) by communicating clear, vivid and accurate conceptions. The first means is illustrated by a reference to the art of learning a language--to arithmetic--to surveying, and to the writing of 'themes.' Can any boy, for instance, reconcile himself to the loathsome effort of learning '_Propria quae maribus_' by any [but] the dimmest sense of its future utility? No, we answer with the Experimentalist: and we go farther even than the Experimentalist is disposed to do (p. 98); for we deny the existence of any future utility. We, the reviewer of this book, at eight years of age, though even then passionately fond of study and disdainful of childish sports, passed some of the most wretched and ungenial days of our life in 'learning by _heart_,' as it is called (oh! most ironical misnomer!), _Propria quae maribus_, '_Quae genus_,' and '_As in praesenti_,' a three-headed monster worse than Cerberus: we _did_ learn them _ad unguem_; and to this hour their accursed barbarisms cling to our memory as ineradicably as the golden lines of AEschylus or Shakspeare. And what was our profit from all this loathsome labour, and the loathsome heap of rubbish thus deposited in the memory? Attend, if you please, good reader: the first professes to teach the irregularities of nouns as to gender (_i. e._ which nouns having a masculine termination are yet feminine, &c.), the second to teach the irregularities of nouns as to number (_i. e._ which want the singular, which the plural), the third to teach the irregularities of verbs (_i. e._ their deviations from the generic forms of the preterite and the supine): this is what they _profess_ to teach. Suppose then their professions realised, what is the result? Why that you have laboriously anticipated a case of anomaly which, if it do actually occur, could not possibly cost more trouble to explain at the time of its occurrence than you are thus premising. This is as if a man should sit down to cull all the difficult cases of action which could ever occur to him in his relations of son, father, citizen, neighbour, public functionary, &c. under the plea that he would thus have got over the labour of discussion before the case itself arrived. Supposing that this could be accomplished, what would it effect but to cancel a benevolent arrangement of providence by which the difficulties of life are distributed with tolerable equality throughout its whole course, and obstinately to accumulate them all upon a particular period. Sufficient for the day is its own evil: dispatch your business as it arises, and every day clears itself: but