Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/636

616 The necessity for precision in the use of terms, thus initiation into scientific terminology, was enforced incidentally on another occasion. A playfellow much older than the child picked up a piece of mica and called it isinglass. This conventional inaccuracy I strongly rebuked, and, procuring a piece of real isinglass, led the child to note its difference, and to condemn in private and without malice the slovenly language of her presumably untaught comrade. Now, the child had a doll called Rosa, and was in the habit of illustrating any absurdity by pretending that Rosa was guilty of it. Some time after the conversation on the isinglass she was watching a stream of water falling in the sunlight from a hose. She exclaimed: "See the beautiful silver water coming from the old gray hose. Rosa would have called that mica!"

When the box of wooden geometric models was thoroughly mastered, after about six months' study, I procured for the child a set of models of crystals, such as are used for studying mineralogy. About half of these proved too complex for study, but the child easily learned to recognize and distinguish twenty-six, partly simple, partly compound forms. As each face of the crystal showed some plane figure which she had already learned, and as she was also familiar with the Greek numerals from three to twelve, it was generally easy for the child to devise the name of the crystal, even when apparently so repelling as a scalenhedron, rhombic dodecahedron, right rhombic pyramid, etc. It was interesting to notice her capacity to discern the general outline of a crystal and thus its generic features, and afterward to distinguish the secondary divisions of its sides, or the specific characters; thus in a four-faced cube, a three-or six-faced tetrahedron, a three-faced octahedron, etc. The forms in the four systems of crystallization were learned by repeated handling of the models, until the child's perceptions had become saturated with them, and she could, for instance, discover for herself four-faced cubes in the curved molding on staircases. Then, at the beginning of the second year, the crystals began to be copied in clay, and opportunity then afforded for studying their axes, or the basis of their classification, by means of long pins thrust through the soft model in appropriate direction.

Arithmetic, the second science in Dr. Hill's category, was begun several months after the first studies of form and outline. Instead of the beans so frequently recommended, the child used sticks of different sizes and colors. For two or three months she studied such numbers as seem almost to form natural complex entities, and hence have often been sacred numbers, thus: four, nine, ten, twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six. The child was exercised in dividing these up into symmetrical groups, whose resemblances she was trained to tell at a glance by the eye, before enumeration. Thus she learned to form groups of threes, fours, and sixes, and to unite them in as many fantastic combinations as could be invented. The object was to effect the transition from the perception of form to the conception of number by a series