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The study of any foreign language, even in its elements, is of the highest value and efficacity. It requires close observation, attentive comparison, nice distinction; proceeding by induction, it teaches the difficult and important art of deriving general rules from analogous facts. These facts being thoughts embodied in words, its object is human thought itself, but thought in its bodily appearance, in its visible, or rather audible shape: rede which at once is reason and specch. Grammar is indeed logic in a concrete form, not an artificial system, but studied by a method similar to that of natural science, based on facts in which the laws of logic reveal themselves. Thus being obliged continually to compare the foreign with his own mother-idiom, the student becomes conscious of those laws of thought and speech which, hitherto, he has followed and practised inconsciously, as it were instinctively. But as every language has created and developed some forms of thought and some ideas unknown to other languages, the student, with the new idiom, acquires not only conscious- ness of what he possessed abready, but really enriches and increases his treasure of ideas and his logic. All this, the fruit of the efforts made in learning a language, and leaving out of our account the really acquired knowledge of it, is what we Germans call„formale Bildung“. It would still be a precious gain, even though the acquired knowledge of the foreign language were never after to be made use of. But this is not the case. Even at college what Latin, French or English the pupils have learned, is to become a means and instrument of further tuition and education in reading the authors. Not that a full and complete knowledge of the language is required before making any such use of it or could even be obtained without such reading. The standard writers in any language are certainly the best teachers of it. When Kossuth, arriving in England as an exile, delivered public speeches which astonished his hearers, some one said to him: You must have had excellent English masters to have learned our lan- guage so well. Indeed, he replied, the very best; one is called Shakespeare, another Burke, another Macaulay etc. Still the first time should be chiefly employed in teaching the language, whatever is read being made subservient to this chief object and chosen and selected accordingly. Thus the selection will be determined by the difficulties of the style and diction, which ought to go on increasing gradually, and by the absence of such difficulties as arise from the subject matter: thoughts above the age or intellectual maturity of the pupils, manners, institutions, a form of civilisation too different from those which are known to them, etc. The only positive test should be: Whatever is read, must be worth reading: No empty trifles. no insipid stories, anecdotes etc. without wit, sense or sentiment.

The second part of our task and the second stage in the study of a language is: ini- tiating the student to the treasures that lie enshrined in it, making him acquainted with the works of genius and with the particular genius of the nation and the different phases of its history. The hitherto acquired knowledge of the language now becomes the medium for the chief object, which is literature. It is true, that knowledge is not, cannot be complete; it is