ks, on Derivation. In the remaining twelve, the Etymology and
Syntax of the ten parts of speech are commingled; and an attempt is made,
to teach simultaneously all that the author judged important in either.
Hence he gives us, in a strange congeries, rules, remarks, illustrations,
false syntax, systematic parsing, exercises in parsing, two different
orders of notes, three different orders of questions, and a variety of
other titles merely occasional. All these things, being additional to his
main text, are to be connected, in the mind of the learner, with the parts
of speech successively, in some new and inexplicable catenation found only
in the arrangement of the lectures. The author himself could not see
through the chaos. He accordingly made his table of contents a mere meagre
alphabetical index. Having once attempted in vain to explain the order of
his instructions, he actually gave the matter up in despair!

38. In length, these pretended lectures vary, from three or four pages, to
eight-and-thirty. Their subjects run thus: 1. Language, Grammar,
Orthography; 2. Nouns and Verbs; 3. Articles; 4. Adjectives; 5.
Participles; 6. Adverbs; 7. Prepositions; 8. Pronouns; 9. Conjunctions; 10.
Interjections and Nouns; 11. Moods and Tenses; 12. Irregular Verbs; 13.
Auxiliary, Passive, and Defective Verbs; 14. Derivation. Which, now, is
"more judicious," such confusion as this, or the arrangement which has been
common from time immemorial? Who that has any respect for the human
intellect, or whose powers of mind deserve any in return, will avouch this
jumble to be "the order of the understanding?" Are the methods of science
to be accounted mere hinderances to instruction? Has grammar really been
made easy by this confounding of its parts? Or are we lured by the name,
"_Familiar Lectures_,"--a term manifestly adopted as a mere decoy, and,
with respect to the work itself, totally inappropriate? If these chapters
have ever been actually delivered as a series of lectures, the reader must
have been employed on some occasions eight or ten times as long as on
others! "People," says Dr. Johnson, "have now-a-days got a strange opinion
that every thing should be taught by _lectures_. Now, I cannot see that
lectures can do so much good as a private reading of the books from which
the lectures are taken. I know of nothing that can be best taught by
lectures, except where experiments are to be shown. You may teach chymistry
by lectures--you _