Page:Father's memoirs of his child.djvu/69

 7 to it with his finger. From the time when he was two years old, and the acquisition of speech seemed to put him in possession of all the instruments necessary to the attainment of knowledge, he immediately began to read, spell, and write, with a rapidity which may scarcely be credited, but by those who were witnesses of its reality. His reading and writing were remarkable principally for the celerity of their progress: but his knowledge of orthography accrued to him in a mode, sufficiently his own to evince, that he was not dependent on the ordinary mechanical process, by which it is rendered so burdensome to the infancy of the retentive faculties, without exercising the ear or the understanding. He did not commit his words to memory from a spelling-book, but caught the elements of which they were compounded, by listening to their articulate pronunciation. Thus, by consulting the sound, and correcting himself, where that might have misled him, according to the analogy of new cases with the known