The pupil who completes these
books will have gained something by practice and will have picked up some
scraps of knowledge; but his information will be vague and disconnected,
and he will have missed that mental training which it is the aim of a good
text-book to afford. A text-book is of value just so far as it presents a
clear, logical development of its subject. It must present its science or
its art as a natural growth, otherwise there is no apology for its being.
+The Study of the Sentence for the Proper Use of Words.+--It is the plan of
_this_ book to trace with easy steps the natural development of the
sentence, to consider the leading facts first and then to descend to the
details. To begin with the parts of speech is to begin with details and to
disregard the higher unities, without which the details are scarcely
intelligible. The part of speech to which a word belongs is determined only
by its function in the sentence, and inflections simply mark the offices
and relations of words. Unless the pupil has been systematically trained to
discover the functions and relations of words as elements of an organic
whole, his knowledge of the parts of speech is of little value. It is not
because he cannot conjugate the verb or decline the pronoun that he falls
into such errors as "How many sounds _have_ each of the vowels?" "Five
years' interest _are_ due.
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