ific conceptions are to
precede empirical experiences. That this is an inversion of the normal
order, we need scarcely repeat. It has been well said concerning the
custom of prefacing the art of speaking any tongue by a drilling in the
parts of speech and their functions, that it is about as reasonable as
prefacing the art of walking by a course of lessons on the bones,
muscles, and nerves of the legs; and much the same thing may be said of
the proposal to preface the art of representing objects, by a
nomenclature and definitions of the lines which they yield on analysis.
These technicalities are alike repulsive and needless. They render the
study distasteful at the very outset; and all with the view of teaching
that which, in the course of practice, will be learnt unconsciously.
Just as the child incidentally gathers the meanings of ordinary words
from the conversations going on around it, without the help of
dictionaries; so, from the remarks on objects, pictures, and its own
drawings, will it presently acquire, not only without effort but even
pleasurably, those same scientific terms which, when taught at first,
are a mystery and a weariness.

If any dependence is to be placed on the general principles of education
that have been laid down, the process of learning to draw should be
throughout continuous with those efforts of early childhood, described
above as so worthy of encouragement. By the time that the voluntary
practice thus initiated has given some steadiness of hand, and some
tolerable ideas of proportion, there will have arisen a vague notion of
body as presenting its three dimensions in perspective. And when, after
sundry abortive, Chinese-like attempts to render this appearance on
paper, there has grown up a pretty clear perception of the thing to be
done, and a desire to do it, a first lesson in empirical perspective may
be given by means of the apparatus occasionally used in explaining
perspective as a science. This sounds alarming; but the experiment is
both comprehensible and interesting to any boy or girl of ordinary
intelligence. A plate of glass so framed as to stand vertically on the
table, being placed before the pupil, and a book or like simple object
laid on the other side of it, he is requested, while keeping the eye in
one position, to make ink-dots on the glass so that they may coincide
with, or hide, the corners of this object. He is next told to join these
dots by lines; on doing which he