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Seventh. It presents an unusually complete illustration of the uses of infinitives and participles.

Eighth. It presents test questions and sentence-making exercises, which compel the pupil to study the text, to think, to construct sentences, to use his learning.

Ninth. It presents ten common faults to be avoided in construction.

Tenth. It presents the most important rules of Syntax and practically applies them.

Eleventh. It presents models for parsing the parts of speech and for the analysis of sentences.

Twelfth. It presents a practical treatment of the principles of capitalization, punctuation, and paragraphing.

Thirteenth. It presents a valuable exercise in the transformation of sentences-grammatical equivalents.

Fourteenth. It presents a specimen exercise in the proper choice of words or Faulty Diction.

Fifteenth. It presents many suggestions on method in teaching this subject. The author's long and varied experience as a teacher and superintendent of schools privileges him to make suggestions in the belief that they will be valuable to young teachers.

This work is not a part of a series of language texts; it is an independent book. A part of several of the exercises is taken from the author's "Lessons in Grammar," the advanced book of his common-school series.

ST. LOUIS, April, 1903.

J. N. P.

GRAMMAR IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS

"The fourth window of the soul opened in the elementary school is grammar, wherein the child is made to get a glimpse of the logical structure of language in which is revealed the logical structure of the intellect; he gets a power to discriminate and hold fast the distinction between what is said and the form of saying it. He gets a scientific glimpse of the forms or laws of all speech. He learns to separate the sound, or the printed form, from the meaning which he gives to the word, and he learns to see the form or law which belongs to his mind and gives it a logical structure; he discriminates verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, and connectives, a kind of discrimination which he is not able to do at all except by introspection. The child gains very rapidly in his power of introspection by his study of grammar; it is undoubtedly the hardest study that he has yet reached in his course. In arithmetic he is obliged to discriminate quantity from quality, and learns to think in directions of quantity alone. This is a severe discipline, but it is not so difficult for him to learn as the discrimination between the printed or spoken word and the kind of meaning which the mind gives to the word.

“This grammatical discipline which seems useless to many people in our time is one of the most useful of all the branches of study in the common school; the grammatical study opens the windows of the soul looking inward and revealing the structure of the soul just as outward sense and the sciences of nature reveal the structure of the earth and the elements of matter. It is necessary to train the power of introspection through grammar in order to enable the human being to discriminate what is only blind feeling and prejudice from clear ideas and principles; without which power of introspection motives cannot be purified, and especially the ethical and the moral cannot be discriminated from mere instinct and selfish impulse."-DR. WILLIAM T. HARRIS.

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"Instruction without practice cannot impart skill, and hence cannot make an artist. The old-time attempt to teach the art of using good English, by means of technical grammar, is an illustration of this error. This attempt was based on the false notion that skill in speech and writing is a necessary result of a knowledge of the rules of language— an error still too common in American schools, and especially in elementary schools, whose pupils are too young to apprehend or apply abstract principles in any art."-E. E. WHITE.

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