monophrastic, inarticulate, and semi-aphasic save in their own vigorous and inelegant way. Nature prompts to a modest reticence for which the deflowerers of all ephebic naiveté should have some respect. Deep interests arise which are almost as sacred as is the hour of visitation of the Holy Ghost to the religious teacher. The mind at times grows in leaps and bounds in a way that seems to defy the great enemy, fatigue; and yet when the teacher grows a little tiresome the pupil is tired in a moment. Thus we have the converse danger of forcing knowledge upon unwilling and unripe minds that have no love for it, which is in many ways psychologically akin to a nameless crime that in some parts of the country meets summary vengeance. (_A_) The heart of education as well as its phyletic root is the vernacular literature and language. These are the chief instruments of the social as well as of the ethnic and patriotic instinct. The prime place of the former we saw in the last chapter, and we now pass to the latter, the uniqueness of which should first be considered. The Century, the largest complete dictionary of English, claims to have 250,000 words, as against 55,000 in the old Webster's Unabridged. Worcester's Unabridged of 1860 has 105,000; Murray's, now in L, it is said, will contain 240,000 principal and 140,000 compound words, or 380,000 words in all. The dictionary of the French Academy has 33,000; that of the Royal Spanish Academy, 50,000; the Dutch dictionary of Van Dale, 86,000; the Italian and Portuguese, each about 50,000 literary, or 150,000 encyclopedic words. Of course, words can really be counted hardly more than ideas or impressions, and compounds, dialects, obsolete terms, localisms, and especially technical terms, swell the number indefinitely. A competent philologist[2] says, if given large liberty, he "will undertake to supply 1,000,000 English words for 1,000,000 American dollars." Chamberlain[3] estimates that our language contains more than two score as many words as all those left us from the Latin. Many savage languages contain only a very few thousand, and some but a few hundred, words. Our tongue is essentially Saxon in its vocabulary and its spirit and, from the time when it was despised and vulgar, has followed an expansion policy, swallowing with little modification terms not only from classical antiquity, but from all modern languages--Indian, African, Chinese, Mongolian--according to its needs, its adopted children far outnumbering those of its own blood. It absorbs at its will the slang of the street gamin, the cant of thieves and beggars; is actually creative in the baby talk of mothers and nurses; drops, forgets, and actually invents new words with no pedigree like those of Lear, Carrol, and many others.[4]