hinted at a radical error, in relation to the inculcation of ideas, as heretofore, and at present practiced in the schools. It will of course be my duty to show in what the error consists; and also to propose a substitute, and point out the manner and means by which the defect may be remedied. This I shall now attempt, after which I shall confine myself more strictly to the subject of short writing.

Let us for a moment turn our attention, to the manner in which children gain ideas during the first three or four years of their lives, when they are entirely unacquainted with the use of letters. The experience of almost every individual, of any considerable observation, must prove, that during this time, much greater improvement is usually made, in proportion to the pains bestowed, than at any subsequent period, not merely as it respects the properties and relations of things, but even in the use of language, as the means of receiving and communicating ideas. Children are able in a very few months to understand the principal tenor of common conversation, to communicate their own ideas verbally, with considerable facility, and to frame sentences with tolerable accuracy—and frequently, before the unaccustomed organs of speech are able to pronounce words with distinctness. We see these little ones chattering with each other from morning till night, and seldom at a loss for words. It is true, that in all their conversation they do not use more than a hundred or two words, but these are words which serve to convey their ideas, and these are words which, in fact, go to make up a very considerable share of the best composition.

Without groping blindly, for that which perhaps they could not understand if attained, they employ industriously the little which they have, and it soon becomes familiar. When any thing new falls within the sphere of their infant powers, they seize it with avidity, and add it to their previous stock. They thus pass on pleasantly, without confusion or distraction, and are soon in possession of a considerable fund of ideas, the pictures or symbols in the mind, of things tangible to the senses, by and through which, all simple ideas are at first derived. If the learner, then, be so fortunate as to receive correct impressions, the ideas will probably continue through life, true and faithful images of the objects which they represent.

Here then is laid the foundation of all that is valuable in human knowledge, and this knowledge may be indefinitely augmented, according to circumstances; but in no way to so great an extent, as by pursuing the orderly footsteps prescribed by nature; for in storing the mind with intellectual wealth, she invariably leads from things tangible, to that which is mental, or intangible to our outward senses. By the mutual consent of those concerned, there have grown up among men, during a succession of ages, two species of language, the oral, and the written. The elements of the first are sounds, of the second visible signs, representing those sounds. The subject upon which it is my duty to treat, has principally to do with these sounds and their signs, and particularly in the joint application of the two, to short spelling and short writing, as I have before shown. Yet the importance of these, in their

constant application to the transmission of thought, so intimately associates them with the subject of inculcation, that I trust I shall be excused for the few remarks which I have thought proper to make upon the subject.

Having briefly hinted at the natural order and method of acquiring knowledge, I will now glance at the course usually pursued in the schools. A child is taught like a parrot, till its tongue can run like a windmill in reading, and by means of this fluency, is enabled to hurry through volumes of learned lumber-perhaps to frame sentences like an automaton grammar millwhile his learning is at best the chaff, without the wheat-and why so? Because the subjects are frequently too vast for his feeble powers, and his attention is too much divided-amid an almost interminable series of words and sentences, he remembers little more than the names of authors, or the title pages of their books. Nor can it be otherwise, while the first and only thing presented to the learner is, a series of school books, professing to teach spelling, reading, arithmetic, grammar, rhetoric, logic, astronomy, &c. &c.: for to the child who has yet but little knowledge, these books present scarcely more than an assemblage of unmeaning words. To the several authors, these words may have represented things-they may have been intimately associated with the ideas of those things, in their minds; but not so with the child. His mind is yet destitute of the images or ideas, of those tangible objects, for which the words are, in one sense, representatives. Hence nine-tenths of his time is devoted to a fruitless and discouraging investigation of types and shadows,

of absent objects, about the existence of which, he has not perhaps been previously informed, but of which he is now expected to acquire knowledge, through the refined, and to him metaphysical language, of those who have spent their lives in preparing to write learnedly, if not intelligibly, upon their respective subjects. The child is expected to read as he runs, and to understand at once, all that he reads. He is required to reason, not from cause to effect, but the reverse; .taking for his premises, the written, or printed views of some learned schoolman, relating to that with which he may have been experimentally familiar, and of which he has simply bodied forth his own conceivings.

Now, if to expect from this method, an easy, rapid, and pleasant progression in the acquirement of useful knowledge, be not to look for impossibilities, then will my short-hand logic have failed in the end proposed, and then will I surrender all pretensions to the contemplated reform at which I have hinted.

It is not denied, that even under every opposing circumstance, there have been occasional examples of very astonishing acquirements; but were the truth known, it would be found, that even in most of these acknowledged examples, the mind has broken through the shackles of the schools, and ripened in the sunshine of reality and truth, as radiated from tangible objects, rather than under the exclusive influence of those sickly rays, refracted and distorted, by the imperfect medium through which they are viewed in the books.

What then would be the result, of the same industrious research, if judiciously directed, by intelligent,

discreet parents, and competent teachers, in acquiring knowledge, upon the principles which nature has suggested to all the nations of the earth, from the creation to the present time, and in which she might now be aided by the accumulated wisdom of so many generations? Newtons, and Lockes, would spring up on every side, to banish ignorance from the face of the earth, by the overwhelming radiance of the truth which they would elicit.

Under the auspices of such a system, each step in the march of improvement would be delightful and profitable; because it would lead to useful knowledge, from realities, rather than to useless learning from guess-work and conjecture. Ideas would consequently be more correctly formed—hence the connecting terms, or names by which realities and their corresponding ideas are denoted, would be more appropriate, find a more ready place in the memory, and seldom fail in the purpose intended: viz. the recording, recalling, or transmitting of ideas. These names or words, are, in spoken language, made up of a very few sounds: these sounds are, in written language, denoted by alphabetical letters-and according to the system which it is my duty to explain, by a few stenographical signs.

These signs, as exhibited in the stenographic alphabet, are twenty in number-but if we confine ourselves to their simple form, without regard to position, we discover but four, viz: the right line, —; the semicircle, ; the circle and line, ; and the quadrant and line, Trace these forms a little further back, and we see them fully embraced in this single figure, 0,