Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/252

 succession, a third, a fourth, and a fifth pair of eyes, is lent to us, and by the aid of each, and through the intervention of language, we are made mentally the spectators of the scene, five times over, and until nothing scarcely remains unnoted or unthought of.

Now it is manifest that, whoever, by the simple and easy means of collecting, and making himself thoroughly acquainted with the meaning of the entire body of descriptive terms, as severally employed by different classes of observers, not only enlarges his knowledge of language (a secondary yet important object) but brings himself into a point of view whence every nice variety of the external world may be distinctly noted, or vividly conceived of. To learn the meaning of all descriptive terms, whether common, technical, poetic, or scientific, is to furnish the mind with a museum of specimens, containing whatever the most practised eyes have described on the face of the material universe.

Yet this is but a portion of the benefit accruing from an extended acquaintance with descriptive vocabularies; for, as any one knows, words are at once our guides and our goads in seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling, with discrimination. Words are the stimulants of perception, and the indicators of the less obtrusive class of sensible facts. There are many thousand appearances in naturethere are innumerable varieties of figure, motion, colour, texture, which would never arrest the eye, and of which we should take no sort of cognizance, if we had not first come to the knowledge of the word which notes the particular phenomenon, and thence been led to look for its archetype in nature.

The hearing of a new descriptive term, with its meaning, is like the"see there," addressed by the quick-sighted and well-informed to the dull, when the two are taking their turn through a museum. It is thus that the