t deal of lost time. The system is
also so rigidly phonic that it is a long time before a child can pick up
an ordinary book with any profit.

Stanley Hall holds that it is best to combine methods, and probably most
of us do this. "The growing agreement" is, he says, "that there is no
one and only orthodox way of teaching and learning this greatest and
hardest of all the arts, in which ear, mouth, eye and hand must each in
turn train the others to automatic perfection, in ways hard and easy, by
devices old and new, mechanically and consciously, actively and
passively ... this is a great gain and seems now secure. While a good
pedagogic method is one of the most economic--both of labour and of
money--of all inventions, we should never forget that the brightest
children, and indeed most children, if taught individually or at home,
need but very few refinements of method. Idiots, as Mr. Seguin first
showed, need and profit greatly by very elaborated methods in learning
how to walk, feed and dress themselves, which would only retard a normal
child. Above all it should be borne in mind that the stated use of any
method does not preclude the incidental use of any and perhaps of _all_
others."

An adaptation of phonic combined with the word method can be found in
_Education by Life_. It is simpler than Miss Dale's, and being combined
with the word method, children get much more quickly to real stories.
Stanley Hall advocates the individual teaching of reading, and since Dr.
Montessori called every one's attention to this we have used it much
more freely, and have found that once the children know some sounds,
there is a great advantage in a certain amount of individual learning,
but class teaching has its own advantages and it seems best to have a
combination. Long since we taught a boy who was mentally deficient and
incapable of intelligent analysis, by whole words and corresponding
pictures. Miss Payne has developed this to a great extent. It is
practically an appeal to the interest in solving puzzles. The children
choose their own pictures and are supplied with envelopes containing
either single sounds, or whole words corresponding with the picture.
They lay _h_ on the house, _g_ on the girl, _p_ on the pond, and later
do the same with words. They certainly enjoy it, and no one is ever kept
waiting. Sometimes the puzzle is to set in order the words of a nursery
rhyme which they already know, sometimes it is to read and dra