Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody. These books give large space
to grammatical Etymology, and demand much memorizing of definitions, rules,
declensions, and conjugations, and much formal word parsing,--work of which
a considerable portion is merely the invention of grammarians, and has
little value in determining the pupil's use of language or in developing
his reasoning faculties. This is a revival of the long-endured, unfruitful,
old-time method.

+Method of Another Class of Text-books+.--In another class are those that
present a miscellaneous collection of lessons in Composition, Spelling,
Pronunciation, Sentence-analysis, Technical Grammar, and General
Information, without unity or continuity. 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 course 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