Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/748

724 into action are the perceptions or senses; and for their exercise, certain organs, as the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the skin, are provided. Through these organs the education of the infant takes place, beginning at birth, and even, as there is good evidence for believing, before birth. Were it not for these instruments, as they may be called, no single point of knowledge could be acquired, no idea formed. The brain, no matter how perfect its organization in other respects, might as well, so far as thought, feeling, and all relations with the external world are concerned, be a block of wood.

The intellect of the infant is immature, for the reason that the part of the brain which is concerned in the process of elaborating the higher qualities of the mind, is in a far more imperfect state of development than is that part which has direct relations with the organs of the special senses. The perceptions and the ideas that are elaborated from them give all the exercise to the inchoate brain that it requires for its full development. Through the perceptions the systematic education of the child should be almost exclusively conducted during the first ten or twelve years of life, and there should be no set lessons to worry his power of attention, to spur his understanding, or to tax his memory. He should be taught how to acquire knowledge by the use of his senses, and there are facts enough surrounding him on all sides to keep him as much engaged as is proper. His own reflections, started into activity, as they will be by his perceptions and by the questions he will ask, will do the rest. He will learn to read almost imperceptibly, of his own accord, with scarcely a word of instruction. If he does not begin to look at books till he is ten years old, he will, by the time a year has elapsed, read better than the child that has begun to learn his letters at three or four. He starts in the race with an unwearied and a better developed brain, and in the long run through life will win more prizes than his precocious competitor.

It is astonishing to find how greatly the perceptions of children are neglected by those who have them in charge. I have frequently been struck with the fact that even pupils who are considered to be well advanced do not know how to use, with even moderate ability, their sense-organs. I met not long ago with a boy of ten years who had mastered, to the satisfaction of his admiring parents, several branches of knowledge; and yet, when shown a picture in a child's book, told to look at it closely for a minute, and then to tell what he had seen, could name only a man, a horse, and a tree. His little sister, seven years old, who did not know how to read, and who was regarded by the father and mother as being somewhat stupid, saw, under like circumstances, a man, a horse, a tree, two little birds on the ground, a cat crawling through the bushes and about to spring on them, a house, a woman standing in the door, and a well at the side of the house. I had the satisfaction of telling the parents that at sixteen she would know a good deal more than would the boy at that age, provided she