by it, saying that seven times eight are fifty-six, without knowing what fifty-six is, or what seven times eight means. He knows all about seven or eight, not from schooling, but from the lessons of life, from having had seven pence or eight marbles; but of the fiftysix, which is beyond his experience, he knows nothing. The nature of the mental operations of such children is, perhaps, as little known to the teacher, to the vicar of the parish, or the kind ladies who take an interest in the school, as the nature of the mental operations of the inhabitants of Saturn.

The best recorded illustration of such sensational learning is given by the Rev. Mr. Brookfield, H. M.'s Inspector, in his official report for 1855-6. Mr. Brookfield called upon two children, aged about eleven years, "who did their arithmetic and reading tolerably well, who wrote something pretty legible, intelligible and sensible, about an omnibus and about a steamboat," to write down the answers of the Church catechism to two questions. It must be observed that they had been accustomed to repeat the catechism during half an hour of each day in day-school and Sunday-school for four or five years; and the following is what they wrote:

"My duty toads God is to bleed in him to fering and to loaf withold your arts withold my mine withold my sold and with my sernth to whirchp and to give thinks to put my old trast in him to call upon him to onner his old name and his world and to save him truly all the days of my life's end."

"My dooty tords my nabers to love him as thyself and to do to all men as I wed thou shalt do and to me- - to love onner and

sake my father and mother -to onner and to bay the queen and all that are pet in forty under her- to smit myself to all my gooness teaches sportial pastures and marsters-to oughten mysilf lordly and every to all my betters-to hut no body by would nor deed to be trew in jist in all my deelins to beer no malis nor atid in your arts to kep my ands from pecken and steel my turn from evil speek and lawing and slanders-not to civet nor desar othermans good but to lern laber trewly to git my own leaving-and to do my dooty in that state of life and to each it his pleas God to call men."

Again:

"They did promis and voal three things in my name first that I should pernounce of the devel and all his walks pumps and valities of this wicked wold and all the sinful larsts of the flesh."

Mr. Brookfield remarks very justly that the error is not a more matter of spelling, not a phonetic expression of ideas that are understood, but that it involves absolute non-apprehension of the meaning of the passages. . .

We have already referred incidentally to a learned pig, and to the parallelism between its training and some kinds of human education. Persons familiar with the tricks taught to animals, are aware that these may all be described as muscular actions performed each consecutively to its proper signal. On hearing the finger nails of the master click together the animal does something in obedience to the sensation; nods its head, or shakes its head, or stands erect, as the case may be. It has no idea that the nod is an affirmation or the shake a negation, and probably has no thirst for knowledge about the matter, being content to play its part correctly and escape the whip. In the case of children the medium of communication is different and the kind of response is different, but the faculty in action is commonly the same. The words of the pig's master are mere by-play, intended to amuse the audience, and the signal is conveyed by other sounds. The words of the human teacher or examiner, his questions for instance, are the signals to the child, each requiring its appropriate answer; but, like the signals to the pig, they are aural sensations, capable as such of producing muscular action through the medium of the sensorium alone. The responses of the child are in words that is to say, in sounds that he has been taught, and that he remembers, but of which he need not understand one iota in order to repeat them, any more than the pig need understand the affirmative or negative character of its nod or shake. In the human species articulate speech is an act precisely analogous to locomotion, requiring the combined and harmonious working of several muscles and the guidance of sense, but in no way essentially connected with the intelligence; and the child may make the right

noises in the right order, just as the pig does not nod its head when the signal requires it to be shaken. . . .

School teachers and managers seldom observe this, because they seldom look deep enough. They are mostly unacquainted with the complexity and extent of sensational operations in the young; they have scarcely ever been accustomed to analyze the acts of the mind, and they think they have probed the depth of intellectual consciousness before they have even approached the surface.

A LESSON IN ETYMOLOGY.

[We propose to give in each number of the Teacher at least one lesson on some subject taught in our common schools, or connected with subjects taught in them, and usually drawn from original sources, or from books not accessible to many of our readers. We are promised help in this department of our labors, and shall hope in this way to make ourselves a pleasant visitor to many school-rooms. Our readers must suppose our lesson addressed to the children.]

The English is a composite language, and contains words derived from many sources, but by far the greater part are taken from two-from the Anglo-Saxon, which is the true parent of the English, and from the Latin, either directly or through the Norman-French. I want to give some examples, in this lesson, of the help that is afforded to a thorough knowledge of our mothertongue by the study of its venerable parent, the Anglo-Saxon, by tracing some words to their origin in that language.

The words "pond," a piece of water, "pound," a place to put stray cattle in, "pin," the little instrument we use so many of, "bin," a place to put corn in, and "pen," an enclosure for sheep or pigs, are words you probably never thought of connecting together in any way. But if you examine them, you find that there is one idea common to them all, that of enclosing, or shutting in. A pond is a piece of water which you can usually see to be

enclosed on all sides by land, and not, like the ocean, apparently illimitable; the pound and the pen are places where cattle are shut in; the pin is something yon use to close up a rent or an opening; in the bin (observe that the letters b and p are both labials, or made by the lips, and therefore easily interchanged,) are shut up corn and wine. You might therefore suspect that these words, so similar in sound, and, as we now see, quite similar in meaning, might have a common source; and that we find to be the case, for they all come from the Anglo-Saxon verb pyndan, to shut up.

Does "pen," the implement we write with, or does "pound," the weight, come from the same source? No: the first comes from the Latin penna, a feather, and the second from the Latin pondus, which itself comes from pendere, to hang. So you see that words having the same sound are not always derived from the

same source.

Let me give another example of the same kind. "Shire " means county, as when we speak of a "shire-town," meaning the town in which the county courts are held, or as in Hampshire, Yorkshire, &c. Can this possibly have anything to do with a ploughshare? Or can a ploughshare be connected with a tailor's shears? Or can that useful implement have anything to do with the sea-shore, or the sea-shore with a share in a railway- or a railway share with a sheer precipice of five hundred feet? Now suppose that in Anglo-Saxon there is a verb sceran, meaning to divide, or cut off. See if you can trace the same meaning through all the words I have enumerated.

Did it ever occur to you to ask what was meant by a "neat's tongue and "neat's-foot oil?" And what does Shakspeare mean when he says, in King Henry VI.

"Methought he bore him in the thickest troop

As doth a lion in a herd of neat."

You must look it out in an

It clearly does not mean "clean." Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, and there you will find "Neat cattle -a beast." So a neat's tongue is, as you probably know, an ox's or a cow's tongue. "Neat" meaning clean, comes from the Latin adjective nitidus, shining. At first sight "fallow" deer and

"fallow " land do not seem to have much to do with each other; but when we find the Anglo-Saxon adjective "falewe," meaning yellow, we see why the same word is applied to both.

When baby is troublesome, I am afraid we sometimes get vexed, and call him "a mischievous little imp." But what can Shakspeare mean when he makes Lord Cromwell talk to King Henry of "that noble imp, your son?" or Spenser, when he addresses the muses thus, "Ye, sacred imps, that on Parnasso dwell?" We find out when we discover an Anglo-Saxon word, "impian," to graft, or plant, and a Swedish noun, "ymp," meaning a scion, -bud, or graft.

Thus you see how, in course of time, words change their meaning. Our word "knave" is the Anglo-Saxon "cnapa," the modern German "knabe," which merely means "boy." So, when in old English, you read of a "knave-child," you must not suppose he is a little rascal, but only that he is a boy, and not a girl.

Our language, together with almost all the other languages of modern Europe, as well as the Latin and Greek, belong to the same great family, the Aryan or Indo-European; and to it belong also languages as far off as those of Hindoostan and Persia. All these languages have a great many words which were originally the same, or derived from the same source, though in the different languages they have often become so changed that only scholars accustomed to the study can recognize them. Sometimes however this is very easy. Let me take as an example the word "ball." In Latin it is "pila," the diminutive of which is "pilula," and from that we get "pill," which is a very unpleasant little ball to most people. In Italian it is "balla," in French "balle," in Spanish and Portugese "bala," and in English "ball." In French a large ball is "ballon;" hence our "balloon": a small ball is " ballot," our "ballot," for voting is sometimes done by balls. In French it is also "boule " and "boulet "; hence our "bullet"; or it is "pelotte" which is our "pellet." In German it is "bohle," and from that we get "bowl" to hold liquids, to play at "bowls," and the "bole" or round part of a tree: and finally in Dutch it is "polle" and from that we get "poll" in poll-tax, i. e., head-tax, for the head is a ball.