when a Polish boy is learning to read or to write his letters he should not be taught to do so from a book written in Latin, Greek, or Arabic, but from one written in his own language, that he may understand what he is doing. Again, if a boy is to understand the use of the rules of rhetoric, the examples on which he is made to practise them should not be taken from Virgil or from Cicero, or from theological, political, or medical writers, but should refer to the objects that surround him, to his books, to his clothes, to trees, houses, and schools. It will also be of use if the examples that are taken to illustrate the first rule be retained, although familiar, to illustrate the remainder. In dialectic, for example, a tree may be taken, and its genus, its species, its relations to other objects, its characteristic peculiarities and the logical definition and distribution of the term may be treated of. We may then proceed to the various ways in which a statement may be made about a tree. Finally, we may show how, by a perfect train of reasoning, and by taking the facts already ascertained as our starting-point, we may discover and demonstrate other properties of a tree. In this way, if, in each case, the use of the rules be illustrated by the same familiar example, the boy will easily master their application to all other subjects.
10. (vi) At first the prescribed form should be imitated with exactness. Later on more freedom may be allowed.
A form will be expressed with more exactness in proportion as care is taken to make it resemble its original. Thus coins that are struck by one die are exactly like the die and one another. So also with books printed from metal type, and with casts made in wax, plaster, or metal. In all other artistic operations, therefore, as far as is possible, any imitation (at any rate the first) should be an exact copy of its original, until the hand, the mind, and the tongue gain more confidence, and can produce good imitations by working freely on their own lines. For instance, those who learn writing take a thin and transparent sheet of paper, place it over the copy that they wish to imitate, and thus can easily form the letters that show through. Or the
