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HARVARD

UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

047*172

DISTRICT OF VERMONT, TO WIT:

BE IT REMEMBERED, that on the second day of December, in the fifty-third year of the Independence of the United States of America, SIMEON IDE, of the said District, hath deposited in this office, the title of a book, the right whereof he claims as proprietor, in the words following, to wit:

"Inductive Grammar, designed for beginners. By an Instructer."

In conformity to the act of the Congress of the United States, entitled "an act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts, and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned."

JESSE GOVE,

Clerk of the District of Vermont. A true copy of record, examined and sealed by me.

J. GOVE, Clerk.

PREFACE.

That system of instruction, which is calculated to attract the attention of the pupil, to awaken his interest, to induce him to make his own deductions, and to direct the youthful mind to the great object of all knowledge—to examine correctly the true principles of nature and art, must be pronounced the best. As soon as a desire for knowledge is excited in the mind of the young, nothing but opportunity is wanting for its acquisition. Commands and reproofs will be unnecessary; but if the pupil discovers no beauty, nor any satisfactory reasons for what is asserted, he may be urged to proceed, but his progress will be slow-he studies because he is compelled, not from choice.

Let the mind acquire a habit of reasoning in youth, and this habit will accompany its possessor through life, and show its beneficial results in every department of business.

Whether the system of instructing our youth in the principles of their own language, which is in use at the present time, is well adapted to the objects we have mentioned, is very much doubted. In this method, the pupil is required to spend much time in committing to memory his grammar. But this is an irksome task, for he discovers few or no principles developed, his memory is taxed, but his reasoning faculties remain unoccupied.

This, however, is but a small part of the defect in the system. When the scholar is required to apply what he has obtained from his grammar, he possesses only a chaos of nouns, declensions, conjugations, modes, tenses, &c. from which he must select the necessary directions for his present purpose. He is thus perplexed and discouraged; and he frequently imbibes such a disrelish for the study from this circumstance, that it is with difficulty he can be made to continue it.

For the truth of this, we appeal to Instructers.

In the following pages a different course is pursued. The pupil is led forward in such a manner as to make his own deductions from the nature of the language.

In the first place, he is informed that a part of the words are used as the names of things,

and that such words are known by one general appellation.

A number of sentences are then given, containing the names of familiar objects, and the pupil is required to point out the words belonging to this class.

After this exercise has been continued a while, it is shown that some names denote but a single individual, while others embrace several, from which the scholar at once obtains the idea of number; then other sentences follow, illustrative of this particular modification of the noun.

In this manner all the parts of speech, with their modifications, are deduced, by familiar reasoning, in regular succession, with a suitable number of sentences following each particular. By this method, the mind of the pupil is not confused with a multitude of unmeaning distinctions.

He sees the office which each class of words performs, and thus becomes familiar with their use, and the relation in which they stand the one to the other. This is accomplished in about the same time that the grammar is committed to memory, according to the method now in vogue.

But one of the greatest advantages of this system is, that it attracts the attention of the scholar, and makes the exercise interesting; for he per

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