has seen and heard, his interest may be excited and his curiosity awakened.

Suppose that we make an imaginary excursion to some pleasant field or
grove, where we may study the habits, the plumage, and the songs of the
little birds.

If we attempt to make the acquaintance of every little feathered singer we
meet, we shall never get to the end of our pleasant task: but we find that
some resemble one another in size, shape, color, habits, and song. These we
associate together and call them sparrows.

We find others differing essentially from the sparrows, but resembling one
another. These we call robins.

We thus find that, although we were unable to become acquainted with each
_individual_ bird, they all belong to a few _classes_, with which we may
soon become familiar.

It is so with the words of our language. There are many thousand words, all
of which belong to eight classes.

These classes of words are called +Parts of Speech+.

We classify birds according to their form, color, etc., but we group words
into _classes_, called +Parts of Speech+, with respect to their use in the
_sentence_.

We find that many words are names. These we put in one class and call them
+Nouns+.