a modern army. This seems so wonderful, that our readers will be glad to see the evidence with their own eyes, and we therefore lay before them fac-similes of the two very first pages of this new code of national instruction, reduced, however, from their 12mo. size to the following:

These pages, simple as they seem, would afford a volume of commentary. We shall only touch on a few principal points.

The first complaint we have to make is that there is no introduction-no prefatory explanation of the modus operandi-that neither child nor teacher has any guide or direction to the use or meaning of the figures and letters thus nakedly and ex abrupto presented to them; and the reader who from the mere inspection of these pages can discover in what the 'phonic method' consists is much more sagacious than we profess to be. At first sight, indeed, the book looks like a child's common picture alphabet, with the first page accidentally torn out: but then we are startled with the title PHONIC, which is meant to express that this new method of teaching proceeds by sounds, in contradistinction to and in supersession of figures-and yet the first thing we find isa figure! This seems rather inconsistent in principle; though, in practice, no doubt, the figure is meant to suggest a sound: but so, we submit, do the ordinary letters A, B, C-which are, after all, only figures suggesting sounds.

But

But we pass that incongruity, and advance to a more puzzling question-what sound does Dr. Kay Shuttleworth's figure mean to suggest? We beg our readers to cast their eye back to it, and they will agree with us that with the help of the supplemental figure a no doubt can exist that the sound to be suggested is the first and ordinary sound of the letter a as used in cart, or waggon, or man-all prominent features in the picture-or the time may be harvest, and the waggon perhaps may be loaded with barley, and then the desired sound will be given four or five times over. But, alas, no! nothing like this is intended. We learn, aliundè and long after, that the figure represents a hayfield; and the sound HAY as connected with the form a is the first phonic lesson' which, under the sanction of the Privy Council, Dr. Kay Shuttleworth would inculcate on the youth of England.

The Parisian pronunciation of French is admitted to be the most correct, and so, we suppose, must be a Londoner's pronunciation of English; and it is certain that a great number-perhaps the majority of the inhabitants of this capital pronounce the letter a, hay; but then, on the other hand, it is equally notorious that the same persons generally pronounce hay, the produce of a meadow, 'ay. So that Dr. Kay Shuttleworth's first phonic' lesson is a little deficient in not explaining whether it means to teach a child to say 'the letter hay,'-or- the 'osses 'ave 'ad their 'ay.' We have said that the Doctor has given no prefatory directions which might clear up this difficulty, and we travelled through the whole lesson book without knowing what to make of this phonic figure, but at last we found that true to his preposterous system of turning everything inside out, and upside down, and setting the cart before the horse-Dr. Kay Shuttleworth had placed his preface at the end of his book, and there at the 101st page we find the following explanation of the enigmatical page we have been examining:

Under the phonic method, the sound of each letter is taught by means of an object, or the picture of an object in which that sound occurs. In giving the first lesson, the teacher places upon the reading frame a picture of a hayfield, with labourers employed in making hay. After talking with the children on the subject of the picture until he has excited their interest and attention, he causes them to sound in unison the word Hay, taking care that the full aspiration be given to the H. He theu tells them that there are two sounds in this little word, both of which he wishes to hear distinctly given. After a few trials the children will learn to separate these sounds, and will be able to give the first sound, or mere hard breathing, or the second sound (which is the long sound of a) as required.'

This explanation shows that the Doctor would certainly not.

call

call dried grass, 'ay, but, on the contrary, would carefully sound the aspirate H; but it is not so clear that he would not say 'the letter hay; but however that may be, it must be confessed that the choice of so ambiguous an example so tardily and imperfectly explained was exceedingly unlucky-a stumble at the threshold being of peculiarly bad omen; and this is the more to be regretted, because the Doctor might have favoured us, instead of a hay-field, with his own portrait, and his own patronymic of KAY would have answered all the purposes of HAY without any of the ambiguity.

But after all, this tardy explanation reveals a blunder as fatal to his phonic system as either of those vulgar cockneyisms would have been; for it turns out that the first sound actually taught is not that which the Doctor means to teach-the sound of a-but the sound represented by the figure 'H;' and, strange to say, that figure H,' representing the first sound which the phonic tyro is to learn, is not to be found anywhere in either of the phonic reading books,-being, as we before said, abolished in common with the rest of the alphabet; and so anxious is Dr. Kay Shuttleworth to eradicate all trace of the old alphabetical abuse, that he nowhere admits capital letters to any share in his pronouncing lessons, nor does he betray to indiscreet childhood the important secret that there exist such forms as B D C, &c., nor, of course, that B and b, C and c, D and d, and so on,-have any connexion or similarity of sound; so that after the pupil had laboured through 260 pages of little a's, and e's, and o's, he would be incapable of reading even the title of the FIRST PHONIC READING BOOK,'-which is thus printed in capital letters, of which the lessons' afford no example.

But we have not yet done with this wonderful explanation. The Doctor produces the word hay as an example of the long sound of a. It is no such thing; it is the addition of the 'y' that in such cases gives this particular tone to a; if the Doctor was to write his own name Ka, it would have a less seemly sound than the addition of the 'y' bestows on it; and it is therefore clear that the first lesson is again essentially wrong in point of fact, for it gives, according to his own explanation, the sound not of a, but of ay, and that sound might have been equally expressed by e, x, œ, ei, eh, ey, all of which are occasionally sounded like ay.

But on what principle does the Doctor assume that the first sound of the letter a should be either hay,' or ay?' All the world-from Cadmus inclusive down to Doctor Kay Shuttleworth exclusive-have given the first, and in all languages but English the only, place to the short sound of a, as in alphabet,' England, France,' Germany,' Holland,' America,' and so on; but the Doctor's rooted antipathy to the alphabet makes

him wish to abolish everything that would restore it to anything like its precedence in the spelling books: but even in English, the Doctor's primary sound of a is, in fact, a very secondary one. We find, in the ordinary dictionaries, that of about 2500 words commencing with A, not a dozen have the sound 'ay.' And even as to the middle of words, we take the two first paragraphs of the Doctor's own explanatory notes, and we find that the letter a occurs 36 times-28 times with the short sound, only 4 with the long, and 4 times mute. Our readers will have observed from the way in which we print this paragraph, how predominant, in the ordinary course of our language, is the short sound of a. On what pretence, then, does Dr. Kay Shuttleworth give to a comparatively rare and accidental anomaly the first place in the phonic principles of the language? He cannot shelter himself under the example of former writers, because he rejects precedent, and professes to found a new and more rational system,by that he must abide.

Now let us turn back to the second page. There again we find that a figure is to convey a sound, which sound the Doctor typifies as

2

a.

Thus a child, who has yet learned only one sound of one letter, is supposed to be acquainted with the order and value of the Arabic numerals, and to be able to comprehend-what we confess we cannot-how there can be an a, before there has been an a.

2

2

1

But what is this sound a? When we thought, as we did till we had arrived at the end of the book, that the first figure represented the sound of a in cart, we- -seeing what we took for an old gateway-thought that it was meant to give the sound of a in gate; but when we found that a meant hay, we were driven from that opinion, and concluded that this cut was to represent a in arch. But we were again mistaken. We learn from the Appendix that

2

3

2

a

2

3

means a as in bar-the distinguishing feature of that cut being, we are told, a bar. So that again we have to wonder at a phonic system taught by figures, and those figures suggesting sounds the very reverse of those which the author appears to have intended. Then we find å, and å, and e, and e, and e, all as absurdly exemplified, or rather enigmatized; and not only is the childone, observe, who as yet has learned but two or three letterssupposed to be familiar with these Arabic numerals, but he is to understand the algebraic sign of equality: in the fifth lesson, p. 13, he is to discover that

--

u co

u = 00

means that 'u is equivalent to oo;' and next page that

To us these hieroglyphics are only ridiculous, but to many a village schoolmistress and even schoolmaster, and to every poor infant, they would indeed be Algebra.

The Doctor's plan of putting last what ought to have been first, has thus led us into details before we arrive at his principles, but we will now exhibit the Doctor's postliminious explanation of the system on which he has proceeded.

'In reading, we use, not the names of the letters, but the sounds of which the letters are the signs.'-p. 97.

If Doctor Kay Shuttleworth had not announced this as a kind of discovery, and advanced it as the axiomatic foundation of his whole system, we should certainly not have been aware of its importance, and should hardly have thought it necessary to guard the rising generation against expanding a short word-wool for example-into such a formidable polysyllable as doubleudoubleoel, or of disfiguring the name of their great benefactor Dr. Shuttleworth into Esaitchuteteeledoubleuoarteaitch, under which he might be mistaken for one of the Ojibbeways. The mischief of such a mode of utterance would certainly be very great; but the danger of its becoming popular seems rather too remote to have required the intervention of the Privy Council to prohibit it. The Doctor proceeds:—

'The Phonic method is founded on this he foregoing] fact, and is so called because it teaches the true sound of each letter as it is brought into notice.'-Ib.

Phonic, as an adjective, is not to be found in the dictionary, but for new things new names-and we do not quarrel with the word as expressing something of, or belonging to, vocal sound,' but inasmuch as we believe that reading and speaking have been in all ages and nations carried on by vocal sounds, we should have been rather at a loss to know why Dr. Kay Shuttleworth calls his method phonic, in contradistinction to all others. It seems, however, that this is only another form of the leading principle of getting rid of the alphabet-of teaching the sounds, not the names, of letters-and that, not in any regular order-which would be returning to the alphabet-but just as they happen 'to be brought into notice;' that is to say, there is to be a different phonic alphabet (we cannot help using the obnoxious word) for every different book; and some professors of the art prefer, we are told, to give children their very first lessons in works somewhat

VOL. LXXIV. NO. CXLVII.

D