Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/91

 earliest childhood, boys delight in pictures and feast their eyes upon them greedily. If we can thus free the gardens of wisdom from their terrors, our labour will have been well employed.” In the second place, the book will excite the boy’s interest and help him to fix his attention; and, thirdly, it will serve as a stepping-stone to the Vestibulum and the Janua, with which end in view it was primarily written.

Imagine the Janua Linguarum considerably shortened, simplified, and illustrated, and you have before you the Orbis Pictus. Each section has a picture corresponding to it, and numbers, affixed to individual words in the text, enable the boy to pick out in the picture the exact object to which the word refers. For example:—

Translated into the vernacular, it was to serve as a first reading-book. Even the letters and the manner of pronouncing them might be learned from a kind of picture