Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/712

690 marks that modify their value, and shows him, writing on the tablet, how to draw them.

I have often witnessed these lessons, and have much admired both the calm patience of the master and the readiness with which the little Cambodians learn. Their memory is extraordinary, and they keep what they have learned much better than our children do. I do not mean that they know better what they know, and that they can draw on a larger part of their knowledge than our children. No, the little that they acquire thus so rapidly continues with them nearly always as unemployed means, as material not put to use, as unproductive elements of knowledge. Their intellectual development in other respects stops early, between sixteen and eighteen years, but their memory still remains surprising. By memory I mean the recollection of sounds, of the eyes, of figures, of words, and of facts. But they do not know, or only know imperfectly, and hardly learn after eighteen years, how to use what they know, to co-ordinate it, to deduce, to draw logical consequences, to generalize; to give their whole mind to a thing. But good sense, delicate discrimination, mingled with some degree of critical judgment regarding all the affairs of current life, are not wanting in them, even in early childhood.

The first series of characters traced by the teacher includes twenty-four vowels, consonants, and diphthongs, and is called the nomo, from the two characters, no and mo, with which it begins, and which together form a Pâli word. These two characters are followed by four others, pont, théa, sét, and them, which with the first two form the phrase Nomo Buddhaya siddhan! or, "Glory be given to Buddha!"—a salutation which resembles that of the Croix de Dieu, or "Cross of God," with which French pupils in the a b c's were formerly accustomed to begin their lessons. The pupil, having learned to read and trace the twenty-four characters of this series, is given the thirty-five characters of the second series, which include various consonants and semi-vowels; then the vowels are given—eighteen hard and eighteen mollified, although the difference is very slight.

These lessons thoroughly learned, the pupil passes to the six hundred and fifty combinations of consonants and vowels, which are very rapidly learned, for the same rule prevails with the combinations of each and all the consonants; so that, when one series is learned, the rest are like it.

When the pupil, after two or three months at the most, has learned all the characters and their combinations, a little sutra, or manual, or treatise on correct morals is put into his hands, which he reads in the presence of the professor or one of the better learned pupils, who corrects him and drills him in the good reading of the work, explaining the meaning if he does not