student will acquire a better knowledge of this matter, practical and theoretical, than by the study of all that has been written on the subject. In this connection, moreover, when it comes to re-composition, i. e., the translation of English into Greek or Latin, that bugbear of the classical student and despair of his teacher, it stands to reason that the trained sight-reader has an immense advantage, because his reading has accustomed him not only to the words of the text but to their logical and especially their rhetorical sequence.

The first peculiarity which the English student meets in reading Latin is the postponement of the finite verb (the finish) to the end of the clauses. He soon learns when translating into English to bring forward the verb to an early part of the sentence according to the English idiom. Again, in translating Greek he will not fail to notice the fertility of Greek construction in participles, in every variety of circumstance, where the English and Latin prefer the adverbial clause. In these cases, then, in order to follow in his translation the easy flow of the Greek, he must acquire a facility in converting these participle clauses into their equivalent English adverbial clauses. Such are obvious illustrations of adaptation of idiom which must be made in order to render practicable, and all the more fruitful because of these necessary adaptations, the discipline of reading at sight. This is legitimate sight-reading which, if insisting on preserving the order of words in rendering, does not warrant over-riding an idiom; a mistake which some teachers make.

Early in the course of his sight-reading the student becomes aware that there is a conventional order of certain expressions belonging to the Latin and Greek which is invariable, and which may or may not correspond with each other or to the English order of equivalent expression; such, for instance, as the position of enclitics, post-positive conjunctions, limiting genitives, attributive and predicate expressions, etc., etc. Of the stated position of these clauses it is the business of grammar to treat. But besides this order of words, natural to each language and invariable, there is another, less amendable to law and more difficult to formulate, the despair of grammar, the delight of rhetoric, upon which depends that variety of emphasis and of ornament which forms the material of style. It must be evident that to study a foreign language without taking cognizance also of this rhetorical order

of words is to miss its peculiar quality and to degrade it into a merely mechanical process. In fact, much of our language teaching fails just here, seeming to be satisfied if the pupil extracts the bare sense of a passage. That which ordinarily passes for a translation manages to rob a sentence of its tone or color, just as one might view the details of a picture without once noting the artist's masterly combination, or criticise the separate instruments of an orchestra without perceiving the general effect of the ensemble.

And it is not only in the most elaborate sentences that a failure to observe this principle of translation necessarily involves omissions and inaccuracies but in the most simple narrative we are apt to miss the point and truth. Even in those most unpromising cases for illustrating these principles, where the student first addresses himself to the solid work of translating, as when he is beginning his Xenophon or Caesar, the principles hold good and have practical application. The average school boy will translate, and translate unchallenged by some teachers, the first sentence of his Anabasis somehow thus:

"Two sons were born to Darius and Parysatis, the elder Artaxerxes, and the younger Cyrus " A translation verbatim et seriatim develops the following: "Of Darius and Parysatis were born two sons, an elder Artaxerxes, and a younger Cyrus "; a rendering which implies as, indeed, history confirms, that there were other sons. There is a significance also in the prominence given, in the latter translation, to the proper names, since Xenophon's uppermost thought as he starts off with the narrative is the question of the royal descent, the right of inheritance, in which centres Cyrus' claim to the throne and the very motive of the Anabasis.

Take, again, the opening sentence to Caesar's De Bello Gallico:

"Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam, qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli apellantum. Hi omnes lingua, institutis, legibus, inter se differunt. Gallos ad Aquitanis Garumna flumen, a Belgis Matrona et Sequana dividit." Our school boy will perhaps translate thus: All Gaul is divided into three parts, of which the Belgians inhabit one, the Aqitani another, and those who are called Celts in their own language and Gauls in ours, the third. The Garumna river separates the Gauls from the Aquitani, the Matrona and

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Sequana from the Belgians." Following the acknowledged principles of sight-reading we get "Gaul is in all divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, another the Aquitani, and the third those who in their own tongue are called Celtae, in ours, Galli. These all, in language, in institutions, in laws, differ from each other. As to the Galli, from the Aquitani the Garumna river separates them; from the Belgae, the Matrona, and Sequana." A translation which gives to Gallia and Gallos, the very subject matter of the De Bello Gallico the emphasis of the original. It suggests, in a small way, the "Mñviv äeîde Oeá," the "Arma Virumque cano," and the "Of man's first disobedience" of the poets. Surely it is worth while for the student, beginning the reading of a new work, not to slight the emphasis and to lose the key-note of the first few lines.

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That inelastic method of translating foreign languages which slavishly adhered to the syntactical construction regardless of the logical force of the order of words was responsible for much of the odium which had befallen the study of the classics. The practice of sight-reading has done much, and is destined to do more, towards freeing students of language from these grammatical shackles, towards opening to them the logical and rhetorical development of the writer's thought and towards exposing the general principles which underlie word arrangment in all languages. "So then," says Weil,1 "so then " (i. e., in order to get the connection of a writer's ideas) "in translating from one language to another, if it is not possible to imitate at the same time the syntax of the original and the order of the words, retain the order of the words and disregard the grammatical relations." And he further adds (than which nothing is truer) that "the great secret of a good translation is to find forms of expression which will allow the translator to adopt into a foreign idiom the order of words which is found in the original.

a

When the construction and the author's order of thoughtterm synonomous with order of words can be made to coincide in the translation, the translator has accomplished in many cases, a master stroke. But so base has been our subjection to what we may call mere syntactical translation that students so taught will invariably alter the verbal order of a passage with an eye solely to the preservation of the syntax even when the order and con'Weils "Order of Words." Transl. by Chas. W. Super. Pp. 26 and 27.

struction, both, would be quite idiomatic in the translation. In fact, the more a student practices these principles of sight-reading the more surprised he will be at the comparatively slight variations from either the syntax or the order of the original text that are required in order to produce the most faithful and effective translation; and above all he will begin to observe the ebb and flow, as it were, of the tide of discourse. There will be the ground swell, pervading the whole body of the narrative, as from the emphasis which arises from the contrasts of the writer's thought, developed from sentence to sentence; then the waves "of every wind" which may well represent those points of emphasis arising from clause being set over against clause in the same sentence; and finally the eddies of local obstructions, or the momentary prominence of single words in the course of the narrative.

All this and more the art of reading at sight is destined to unfold to the student's comprehension, and we have dwelt on this point, in conclusion, because the hitherto obscure laws of emphasis and the still more obscure principles governing the order of words in sentences, can best be understood and taught through the practice of sight-reading; a practice which, all but recently, has opened up, even to the average student, this new and promising field in the study of language.

THE

THE LAW AND THE BOY.

IDA ESTELLE CROUCH, RICO, COLO.

HE boy is a familiar object as he presents himself to the fostering care of the pedagogical idea, on a Monday morning, about the first of September, shortly after his sixth birthday. With what an inquiring gaze does he look up into his teacher's face on that memorable first day of school. He has a proud air of self-assurance. His face is round and rosy, and, as this is an extra occasion, for the present, clean.

As the assayer carefully analyzes a bit of new ore to determine the relations of the familiar elements, the educational system realizes that in this boy it has one of nature's unsolved problems. He stands there at the door of the schoolroom as on the threshold of fate, uniting two destinies, the triumphs of the past and the

hopes of the future. All influences meet in him. He is the exponent of a ceaseless energy. He is the embryonic prophecy of a divine ultimatum. He is the future, itself.

Nature planned for him in the infinitude of chaos, or ever the earth was, and darkness brooded over the face of the deep. Who shall number the eons ago? Ask of the drops of the ocean, the sands of its shores. But chaos was troubled, and the protoplasmic germs stirred restlessly seeking a new environment. The edict of creative will had gone forth, and law governed force. In response to the resistless impulse each chemical atom sought its centre with an energy that lighted the gloom of space, and melted the moving masses of primal matter.

Law is a way of doing things. In nature it is the result of omnipotent plan and perfect foreknowledge. It is not a cause, mind is the only entity that can be a cause; and it is the province of mind to actualize its own possibilities by a perfectly ordered and unalterable sequence of dependent events throughout an infinity of differentiations and harmonic unison. Law is God's way of working. Its constant presence is manifested in each pebble, and leaf and tiny insect. It draws the dewdrop to the heart of the lily with the same voice that governs the cataract's plunge into the abyss; and the gentle beauty of a meadow blossom bursts into the light in obedience to the power that controls the cosmical sweep of the stellar systems round the throne of God.

The universe exists only by virtue of its undeviating order of progress. How shall the feeble comprehension of man follow the majestic evolutions by which the earth was prepared for her lord? The royal intellect of a Copernicus, a Kant, a Newton, or a Darwin whispers of the concentrations of the elements, the retreat of the waters, the life principle instilled into a tiny mass of cells, of monsters feeding from a tropical growth that would dwarf the big trees of California — reading the marvelous legend on the fiery scroll of the heavens, or in page after page of geological strata. And to prepare the kingdom for the monarch, nature must store the sunshine in her subterranean vaults that he may have heat; she must fill her reservoirs with oil and gas that he may have light; there must be the ice reign and the loosening of the floods once more to grind the rock into a fertile soil that he may have bread. At last, when oceans are locked in their shores, and vegetation is restrained in its appalling luxuriance, and the