Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/489

Rh study of the arts of expression, which is equivalent to the study of literature, rhetoric, and style, was reserved until after many years of study of things should have accumulated impressions and ideas which spontaneously sought an outlet. Further, the child was taught to draw in simple combinations of lines for many months before attempting to write. When this difficult and complex muscular exercise was approached, she began it with unusual ease, and in a few weeks, at the age of six, already commanded a firm and legible handwriting. Further, and for the same purpose, no set copy-book was used from which meaningless sentences could be imitated; but the child proceeded at once to utilize the art of writing in precisely the same way that humanity has done in passing from barbarism with spoken traditions, to civilization with a recorded history. She recorded at first with printed, afterward with script characters, the history of a group of hyacinths, whose development she watched from birth to death. The writing, though compelled to be carefully done, was recognized as no end in itself, but as a means to preserve a connected history of a series of interesting events, otherwise liable to lapse into oblivion. The art was thus approached as all arts should be, from the stand-point of its real genesis, and tended to place itself in the same relative position in the child's mind that it had occupied in the real history of the world.

Study of the pathological conditions of writer's cramp, and of the numerous brain-lesions which have so marvelously dissected the faculty of comprehending verbal and written signs, has revealed a hitherto unsuspected complexity in the muscular movements involved in writing, and of the mental processes necessary to language. The discovery has not yet modified the glaring crudity of the educational methods which persist in beginning mental training with a forced drill in these complex processes and gymnastics.

Not speech abstractions, the highest conquest of the mind, but the development of the visual conceptions, which are its earliest spontaneous achievement, should be the first object of systematic training. Forms and colors are the elements of all visual impressions; and these are, moreover, susceptible of a scientific classification which can, from the beginning, be rendered appreciable to the child. It is upon forms and colors, therefore, that both perception and memory must first be exercised. The visual impression should be amplified up to the point at which it is able to fix itself on the mind by its own momentum; therefore, without conscious effort. When the mind has accumulated a stock of reminiscences which can not be forgotten, it will, by so much, have enriched its structure and enlarged its furniture. It is then prepared for voluntary efforts at recollection.

The amplification of the impression is effected in two ways: 1. The impression may be associated with an action on the part of the child,