reading and writing were introduced into the elementary curriculum and training in them became general. The books used for this purpose, of course, contained only extracts from the Bible. They were wholly religious in character. The German word for primer means little bible. This primer appeared in 1419.

In the A. B. C. book published by Schulte in 1532, an attempt was made to adapt the material more to the children's interests, and this notion received a decided impetus when Basedow (1723-1790) advocated the teaching of reading through play in eating. The children were rewarded with sweetmeats for their success in learning German or Latin through games. A single quotation shows how Basedow put this plan into general use. "The children must have breakfast and it is not necessary for any child to eat the alphabet more than three weeks. The cost of shaping the dough into letters is less than onehalf penny daily for each child."'*

Early Methods

The earliest teaching of reading in England was probably done with the abacus. This was an arrangement of the first nine letters of the alphabet in Christ-cross-row, afterwards called a chriss-crossrow. When these were mastered, other letters were given. As the letters were learned in every possible direction, the device proved laborious in the extreme.

* Quoted by Huey, Chapt. XIII, pp. 241, 242.

The abacus was superseded by the hornbook, which came into existence about 1450. "The hornbook consisted of a square, short-handled wood or paste-board paddle, upon which was pasted a sheet of paper containing small letters and capitals, the Arabic and Roman numerals, as many syllables as could be crowded into the space, together with the Lord's Prayer. The paper was protected by a sheet of transparent horn.'** Sometimes the edges

were protected by strips of brass.

This was followed by the A. B. C. catechism. All the reading material for the catechism and for the classes above it was taken from the Bible. The first class above the catechism was called the Psalter class; the second, the Testament class; the third, the Bible class.

The New England Primer

In 1690, the catechism was supplemented by the New England Primer, which really marked the first effort at secularizing the schools. This book "contained the alphabet, lists of vowels and consonants, lists of syllables, of words for spelling arranged according to the number of syllables; rhymes for illustrative wood-cuts for the letters in order, moral injunctions, prayers, catechisms, etc., for the children, including "Now I lay me down to sleep."+ Some of the verses accompanying the wood-cuts and used to teach the alphabet were:

*Reeder: Educa. R. 18, 225, 226.

Huey: The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading, p. 244.

In Adam's fall

We sinned all.

Noah did view

The old world & new.

Peter deny'd

His Lord and cry'd.

Zaccheus he

Did climb a tree

Our Lord to see.

The Webster Books

Following the decline of this primer, which occurred after the revolution when the colonies were awakening to their new life and its responsibilities, came, in 1783, the Webster Speller, which combined the ideas of the primer, speller, and reader. No other school book has ever had so extensive a sale in America as this, more than 60,000,000 copies having been sold up to 1895 and even at the present time it is still in use.

This speller was followed in 1785 by the Webster reader, really the first American school reader. It contained many dialogues, narratives, biographies, and was intended to instruct "in the geography, history, and politics of the United States." In its pronounced tendency to secularize the reading material, it corresponded very closely to Der Kinderfreund, published in Germany in 1776 by Frederick Eberhard Rochow.

Among other readers which appeared during the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century were: Lindlay Murray's English Reader, published in London in 1799, which had its lessons "classified under the following headings: narratives, didactic, argumentative, descriptive, pathetic, promiscuous, dialogs, and public speeches"; the Columbian Orator; the American Preceptor by Caleb Bingham; the Columbian Class Book in 1825, containing many descriptions of strange countries; and the National Reader by John Pierpont, which was the first to have many selections by American authors.

Keagy's Pestalozzian primer in 1826 marked some change in the attention given to method as it began to emphasize the teaching of reading by object lessons. The earliest effort at specialization came in 1824, when Daniel Adams published his Agricultural reader. It was followed three years later by Rev. J. L. Blake's Historical reader.

Series of Readers

After this, readers began to appear in series of two or three books each. The series usually consisted of an Introduction, a Middle book, and a Sequel. The primer and speller were sometimes added to complete the series. The Putnam series in 1828 was the first to attempt some work of the dictionary type, that of explaining difficult words and phrases, and the Worcester series of the same year was the first to advocate the word-method of teach

ing. The McGuffey six book series, the pioneer of its kind, which appeared in 1850, dealt with the widest range of subject-matter and probably had the most extensive sale of any series ever published. As soon as the custom of adopting a series became fairly well fixed, supplementary readers began to be introduced, the Swinton series, in 1880, being the first.

Since its publication, there has been a bewildering number of short-lived series, more or less scrappy in character, thrust upon the market. But out of the mass of seemingly contradictory opinions that have prevailed in regard to the selection of material, the notion is gradually gaining ground that only material of real literary worth is desirable, and that it should be presented, as far as possible, in the form of literary wholes rather than by fragments.

METHODS OF TEACHING READING

There is much evidence to show that the race was in the pictograph stage more than eight thousand years ago. Of course gesturing preceded picturing as a form of communication, but the alphabet was born of the picture. At first there were almost as many schemes for writing as there were different nations. However, all writing began with picturemaking and all reading with picture-books. Picture writing, in its infancy, assumed many peculiar arrangements, but there was always some effort at order. A temporal succession was usually expressed