THE GLOBE SERIES OF READERS.*
THE pkysique, so to speak, of this series, which consists of six readers and two primers, is excellent. The paper is good, the type large and clear, and the illustrations, which are sufficiently numerous to please, and too few to distract, call for little criti- oism, though in some instances the blocks appear to have seen hard service, and the woodcuts occasionally have a common look about them. To the text, or rather to the method of the com- pilation, (pile the same praise cannot be accorded. The system The Globe Readers. Compiled and Edited by A. F. Munson, MA. London : Macmillan and Co. of marking pronunciation, though sanctioned, we are told, by the high authority of Professor Bain, does not commend itself as judicious. The letters a,6, i, 6, 4, with the acute accent, are directed to be pronounced as the diphthongs in "main," "mien," "mine," "moan," and "moon." This is neither the natural nor the common pronunciation of these vowels in English, though the contrary is often supposed to be the case. They are'not usually so sounded, save where the succeeding con- sonant is followed by an e mute—a mere orthographical device—or where, by a false analogy, the names otthe vowels have induced a corresponding pronunciation. It should have been pointed out that the sound of u in " tune " is a degrada- tion of the Continental u, the true sound of which is .neirly preserved in the Scottish "grid," "pair," &c. The proper short sound of a is heard in "put," "full," the long sound in "rule," "yule," and to mark the former 4, and the latter 4, is an unnecessary deviation from the accepted use of the cir- cumflex and grave accents. The broad a in "all" were better represented by the Swedish ti than by 15, and to signify by () that a vowel is long, but unaccented, is surely a confusing employment of the symbol. A similar exception may be taken to the use of a and 6, to note the sounds of a in "far and a in " all," when unaccented. These marks would have done as well as any other, were it not that, by almost universal consent, they already subserve different_ orthographies' needs. It is worth while insisting on the fact that in English, as in Anglo-Saxon, the vowels had originally, and still have, properly, nearly the same values as on the Continent. A much needed reform in our orthography can only thus be brought about, and the awkward singularity of our pronunciation of the vowels, when we depart from what may be fairly termed their legitimate sounds, removed.
Of the series, the earlier volumes are, perhaps, the most im- portant. If the art of reading is not found easy by children, their elders have found it still less easy to invent a thoroughly satisfactory method of teaching the rudiments of the art. Not to be possessed of the art, is to be destitute, as it were, of a sense, to be in a measure mentally blind. The grown man who cannot read has no other knowledge than that gained by his personal experiences, together with some reflection of that possessed by his circle of acquaintances. He is a member not of society, but of a coterie. Hence the paramount importance, not to himself merely, or even mainly, but to society, that every one should at least be able to read, that he may be capable of becoming a full member of it. The acquirement of the art must be most difficult to the immature minds of children. We may under- stand the difficulty, when we reflect upon the painful drudgery one has to go through in beginning to learn a language written in a different character from that of our own. Take Raman, for instance, with its thirty odd letters, and some half-dozen sounds to many of them. Simply to decipher Russian, with any- thing like the ease with which we decipher English—by words, even by sentences—requires the assiduous study of at least twelve months. With Arabic, twice or thrice that time is necessary ; while Chinese children are said to take six or seven years in learning to spell through their horn-books. On an average, an English child probably takes, at least, two years to learn to read with facility enough to make the practice of reading other- wise than irksome. Such, at least, is the case upon any system of instruction yet invented. The matter has not been sufficiently investigated, deductively or inductively. There are no statistics enabling a judgm ent to be formed of the comparative excellence and rapidity of the various systems in vogue, and the subject can only, at present, be treated deductively. The first thing the compiler of an elementary reader should do, is to collect a child's vocabulary. A child of three will have a stock of not more, probably, than half a hundred words ; of six, a hundred; of nine, from two to - three hundred. With these materials, sentences should be con- structed, and short stories and descriptions put together, of a nature to interest the little learners. They should be taught, as recommended in the Oxford Series, to read words as wholes, not by parts or syllables, to read them as a sort of ideographs. A little experience will soon enable them to recognise the parts and their respective values, but both analysis and synthesis should be allowed. to follow naturally in the wake of concrete knowledge, not• taught directly to intellects far too immature to be capable of these mental operations in any useful degree. The words need not be all monosyllabic,—children use polysyllabic words freely enough. Spelling, which is an analytic operation extremely irksome and uninteresting to children, should not ba insisted upon at first,—perhaps, at no stage as a separate task. The teaching should be wholly dogmatic, and based as far as possible upon the child's vocabulary, until he becomes fairly familiar with the written representations of his stock of words. He will by that time have unconsciously acquired a certain elementary knowledge of principles, which it will be easy to develop, both immediately and mediately,, through continued reading. In the Primers, Mr. Munson has made a good choice of words, though he has stuck somewhat too closely to mono- syllables. In the second primer, the lessons consist of short stories or descriptions, some of• which are excellent; others might have been told with more simplicity and less repetition. He adopts the method, followed in most reading books, of impressing the vowel and diphthong sounds upon the memory by frequent repetition, a number of lessons in suc- cession being devoted to the same vowel or vowel combination. This plan has its merits, but the disadvantage of it lies in its irksomeness to children, who love variety. The earlier lessons in the first primer would hardly attract children. They consist, not of short stories, &c., but of phrases, such as "I am at it.
It am I in if an ox is in, it is on us," &c. Further on, we have sentences such as," There is rum in the
tun They got some fun at the tun," &c. Phrases of this kind are to children sound divorced from sense, and render instruction both difficult and uninteresting. The plan of introducing exceptional, yet not uncommon words, in special type, is an excellent one, and might with advantage have been carried out more extensively. The jingling rhymes, too, are good, and are sure to be appreciated by the little beginners whose task they are intended to relieve. The Readers are better than the Primers. The selections are good, and sufficiently varied in style and matter. The didactic element is not too largely introduced, and the attempt to graduate the lessons is, perhaps, as successful as any such attempt can be. The fact is, children's literature of a high order is anything but extensive ; there are not many Lewis Carrolls in the world, and the Blakes are rarer still. Mr. Munson has been wisely bold in " adapting " some of the pieces to suit his readers. Numberless extracts from good authors, by a certain amount of delatinisation and some sim- plification of phraseological structure, may be made wholly in- telligible to very young readers. The selection, from a literary point of view, is,*of course, open to criticism. But then, every chrestomathy must be so, and we should simply illustrate the fact in indicating a different selection. After all, the choice, within certain limits, is a matter of minor importance, so long as the object is rather to teach the art of reading, than to convey instruction, or to present models for composition. As Mr. Munson well observes, "The first purpose of a series of Reading Books is to furnish a succession of lessons of such a character as to teach children to read, and to implant in their minds the love of reading." In this, as in all similar collections, the extracts are taken from books written for men, not for children, and there seems to be no good reason why the language of men should not sometimes be translated into that of children, as far as practicable, without sacrificing too much of the meaning and force of the original.
Explanatory notes are appended to the Lessons, elucidating the more difficult words and phrases. These, if left to himself, the young student will, doubtless, be inclined to skip, but it should be the business of the teacher to induce his pupil to attend to them. With patience, he may be persuaded to desire explanation, and once this desire is implanted in him, a great step forward will have been made in his intellectual development. The notes, therefore, should be clear enough to be easily intel- ligible and accurate in substance, though exhaustiveness of definition need not be aimed at. Mr. Maxison has followed the fashion in giving his readers mild doses of etymology which can do no harm, and the proper names occurring in the Lessons are not left without some brief account of whom or what they desig- nate. Some of the notes show a certain want of care. A " myth " is wrongly defined (Book IV., p. 2) as "a fanciful story or a fiction ;" the true meaning of "journey" would have been beet illustrated by reference to the word "journeyman," in which its original sense is preserved. Statues are not" carved" out of bronze, and the description of chemistry as the "science that considers the nature and component part of bodies" is both awkward and misleading, though not, strictly speaking, inaccurate.
In fine, the series is as good as most others of the kind, and better than many, but has nothing distinctly novel about it,
except the excellence of the illustrations, for which the publishers deserve commendation. The editor aims too much at combining instruction in reading with a sort of universal smattering, a plan likely, in our opinion, to confuse the young student. It is a standing wonder to the present writer that, in the compilation of Readers, the works of such authors as William Cobbett, and. many of the sketches of travel and adventure contained in periodical literature, are not made use of, while much tawdry poetry is It stock element in nearly all of them. Mr. Murison's series will stand a fair chance of success, in the competition with the crowd of similar works that flood the educational market, but the ideal Reader has yet to be produced. Many a similar series must appear, have its day, and vanish, before this result, the importance of which can hardly be over-rated, will be attained.
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