ositive sciences, which train the power of
observation and require truth to detail. If we should pursue the
subject into the collegiate period, we should find mental and moral
science, literature, and history coming to their rights. If this be in
the main psychological, we see that language study, as such, should
have no great place in secondary education. The study of grammar, as
has been already said, is very useful in the early periods of
development if taught vocally; it brings the child out in
self-expression, and carries its own correctives, from the fact that
its results are always open to social control. These are, in my mind,
the main functions of the study of language.

What, then, is the justification for devoting ten or twelve years of
the youth's time to study of a dead language, as is commonly done in
the case of Latin? The utility of expression does not enter into it,
and the discipline of truth to elegant literary copy can be even so
well attained from the study of our own tongue, which is lamentably
neglected. In all this dreary language study, the youth's interest is
dried up at its source. He is fed on formulas and rules; he has no
outlet for invention or discovery; lists of exceptions to the rules
destroy the remnant of his curiosity and incentive; even reasoning
from analogy is strictly forbidden him; he is shut up from Nature as
in a room with no windows; the dictionary is his authority as absolute
and final as it is flat and sterile. His very industry, being forced
rather than spontaneous, makes him mentally, no less than physically,
stoop-shouldered and near-sighted. It seems to be one of those
mistakes of the past still so well lodged in tradition and class
rivalry that soundness of culture is artificially identified with its
maintenance. Yet there is no reason that the spirit of classical
culture and the durable elements of Greek and Roman life should not be
as well acquired--nay, better--from the study of history, archaeology,
and literature. For this language work is not study of literature. Not
one in one hundred of the students who are forced through the
periodical examinations in these languages ever gets any insight into
their aesthetic quality or any inspiration from their form.

But more than this. At least one positively vicious effect follows
from language study with grammar and lexicon, no matter what the
language be. The habit of intellectual guessing grows with the need of
contin