Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/262

 and musical sounds especially, generate highly complex sensations, as related one to the other, successively, as in melody, or simultaneously, as in harmony.

A second series of exercises may be furnished by producing those terms (belonging to each of the senses,) that express some relation of the qualities of bodies to natural uses, ends, or artificial purposes; such are the wordsductile, malleable, soluble, arid, humid, tenacious, penetrating, ponderable, impalpable, opaque, transparent, refractive, reflecting, radiating, corrosive, stimulating, absorbent, dispersive, sedative.

A third series may consist of those terms, many of them scientific or technical, which express the elementary characteristics of bodies, or their generic or specific adjuncts; such as, siliceous, argillaceous, metallic, vitreous, ligneous, bituminous, saline, gelatinous; orgranivorous, carnivorous, gregarious, predacious, viviparous, oviparous, biped, quadruped, reptile.

A fourth series, embracing a wide variety of terms, would include those designations of the sensible qualities of bodies which indicate, or connote, the feelings, pleasurable or painful, excited in us by them: such as.

First, the more simple and organic, namelytepid, hot, scalding, cold, re-freshing, burning, irritating, glaring, dazzling, stunning, sweet, soothing, thrilling, melodious: or, secondly, the more complicate, and such as involve associations with the intellectual and moral faculties; as the wordsbeautiful, sublime, pleasing, gentle, grand, magnificent, tremendous, terrible, awful, astounding, exhilarating, melancholy, monotonous, invigorating, cheerful, gloomy: orcomplicated, complex, simple, abstruse, recondite, obscure, evanescent, refined, subtile.

Under heads such as these, and which may be varied in many ways, at the pleasure of the teacher, and for the better exercise of the learner, it will be easy to include the entire vocabulary of concrete terms belonging to the