t be proffered to excite his
industry. Besides the disadvantage of early exhausting our stock of
incitements, it is dangerous in teaching to humour pupils with a
variety of objects by way of relieving their attention. The pleasure
of _thinking_, and much of the profit, must frequently depend upon our
preserving the greatest possible connection between our ideas. Those
who allow themselves to start from one object to another, acquire such
dissipated habits of mind, that they cannot, without extreme
difficulty and reluctance, follow any connected train of thought. You
cannot teach those who will not follow the chain of your reasons; upon
the connection of our ideas, useful memory and reasoning must depend.
We will give you an instance: arithmetic is one of the first things
that we attempt to teach children. In the following dialogue, which
passed between a boy of five years old and his father, we may observe
that, till the child followed his father's train of ideas, he could
not be taught.

_Father._ _S----_, how many can you take from one?

_S----._ None.

_Father._ None! Think; can you take nothing from one?

_S----._ None, except that one.

_Father._ Except! Then you can take one from one?

_S----._ Yes, _that one_.

_Father._ How many then can you take from one?

_S----._ One.

_Father._ Very true; but now, can you take two from one?

_S----._ Yes, if they were figures I could, with a rubber-out. (This
child had frequently sums written for him with a black lead pencil,
and he used to rub out his figures when they were wrong with Indian
rubber, which he had heard called _rubber-out_.)

_Father._ Yes, you could; but now we will not talk of figures, we will
talk of things. There may be one horse or two horses, or one man or
two men.

_S----._ Yes, or one coat or two coats.

_Father._ Yes, or one thing or two things, no matter what they are.
Now, could you take two things from one thing?

_S----._ Yes, if there were three things I could take away two things,
and leave one.

His Father took up a cake from the tea-table.

_Father._ Could I take two cakes from this one cake?

_S----._ You could take two pieces.

His Father divided the cake into halves, and held up each half so that
the child might distinctly see them.

_Father._ What would you call these two pieces?

_S----._ Two cakes.

_Father._ No, not two cakes.

_S----._ Two biscuits.

_Father._ Holding up a whole biscuit: What is this?