remain fresh and permanent. We find, accordingly, that children can easily learn Scriptural and secular stories from pictures. Indeed, he who has once seen a rhinoceros (even in a picture) or been present at a certain occurrence, can picture the animal to himself and retain the event in his memory with greater ease than if they had been described to him six hundred times. Hence the saying of Plautus: “An eye-witness is worth more than ten ear-witnesses.” Horace also says: “What is entrusted to the fickle ears makes less impression on the mind than things which are actually presented to the eyes and which the spectator stores up for himself.”
In the same manner, whoever has once seen a dissection of the human body will understand and remember the relative position of its parts with far greater certainty than if he had read the most exhaustive treatises on anatomy, but had never actually seen a dissection performed. Hence the saying, “Seeing is believing.”
10. If the objects themselves cannot be procured, representations of them may be used. Copies or models may be constructed for teaching purposes, and the same principle may be adopted by botanists, geometricians, zoologists, and geographers, who should illustrate their descriptions by engravings of the objects described. The same thing should be done in books on physics and elsewhere. For example, the human body will be well explained by ocular demonstration if the following plan be adopted. A skeleton should be procured (either such an one as is usually kept in universities, or one made of wood), and on this framework should be placed the muscles, sinews, nerves, veins, arteries, as well as the intestines, the lungs, the heart, the diaphragm, and the liver. These should be made of leather and stuffed with wool, and should be of the right size and in the right place, while on each organ should be written its name and its function. If you take the student of medicine to this construction and explain each part to him separately, he will grasp all the details without any effort, and from that time forth will
