"Fighting against Wrong, and for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful." FOR BOYS AND GIRLS. THE LITTLE CORPORAL Is acknowledged by the leading papers to be the BEST JUVENILE PAPER IN AMERICA! $1,00 a Year in Advance.-Sample Copy, 10 Cents. As a sample of the thousands of indorsements we have received, altogether gratuitous, we give the following from the January number of The American Phrenological Journal of New York: The Little Corporal.-Mr. Sewell's Western juvenile surpasses, both in real merit For the sake of doubling our already East or West. His success excites the and in circulation, any similar attempt, very large list, we offer a Magnificent List of Premiums! We will only give a synopsis here. For particulars see the last uumber of The Little Corporal, which can be had by mail, on application. The list is as follows: 1. Parlor Organs and Melodeons are offered as premiums for large clubs of new subscribers. This is a splendid chance for Schools or Families to secure fine instru ments easily. See last number of The Little Corporal. 2. "The Heavenly Cherubs," our magnificent premium picture. See same paper. 3. All who send six names, with six dollars, at one time, will receive the premium picture and The Little Corporal free, for one year, either 1866 or 1867. 4. For a club of ten, at $1 each, we send free, a copy of The Little Corporal for one year, and a box of beautiful water colors, worth $1. 5. For a club of fifteen, at $1 each, we send free, a copy of the premium picture, a copy of The Little Corporal for one year, and a large box of fine water colors, worth $1.50. 6. We are also offering Sewing Machines as Premiums. Write for the Sewing Machine Circular. cupidity of others, and we now have a swarm of juvenile journals launched on the uncertain sea of experiment. While we wish well to all good endeavors, we must award the credit to The Little Corporal of leading the van. The Springfield (0.) Republic says:"The Little Corporal is the unrivaled juvenile paper of the West, and is unsurpassed by any in the world." The Little Corporal, though styled a children's It is master of the situation, and has the paper, is a General within itself. key to every child's heart. The terms are one dollar a year.—Piqua (0.) Democrat. As the press everywhere speaks in the highest terms of Mr. Sewell's children's magazine, we can only, after a careful examination, re-echo the universal acclaim.-Monitor (Alliance, 0.) Alfred L. Sewell, the gentlemen who succeeded so admirably in raising the Army of the American Eagle, and by that means presenting such an enormous sum to the relief of our poor, sick and wounded soldiers, has succeeded in establishing on a firm, and we trust an enduring basis, The Little Corporal, and the reason that he has succeeded so well, is because he has made it the best child's paper in America, -Chronicle (Dodgeville, Wis.) ***Money may be sent at our risk when sent by draft or money order, or where neither of these can be obtained, in a registered letter. ADDRESS ALFRED L. SEWELL, Publisher of The Little Corporal, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. SPECIAL INDUCEMENTS TO TEACHERS. Al LANGUAGE VERSUS GRAMMARS! The longer I live and think, the more dogged my conviction grows, that the definitions and rules and abstractions of grammar are altogether unsuited to the age and cerebral condition of pupils, before they are ready to enter the upper classes of the High-School. All the knowledge of the laws of their native tongue which they need, can be acquired in the Secondary Department in the same way as in the Primary, (mutatis mutandis, of course,) practically, by drills in language, by sentence-building,. and, finally, when the learners are ripe for it, by original composition. I am confident that young people trained according to this natural method, under a lively and judicious teacher, himself possessing a ready command of correct and forcible language, fluency and versatility of expression, will, at the end of the course, not only know a great deal more of actual grammar, but will, in addition, have secured a correctness of style, in which classes taught in the old-fashioned way are so woefully deficient. At any rate, their grammatical furniture, be it much or little, will be of their own making. Every law will be the fruit of their own observation and deductions, acquired without weariness, thoroughly understood, since it will be the out-growth of their own intellect, not forced upon them at second hand. As a necessary consequence, it will be easily remembered, without the nauseous drillings and reviews indispensable in a course of artificial or conventional grammar rules. To them, composition, that bugbear of our schools, will be divested of its terrors. By the time they are prepared for it, it will be a comparatively easy and, therefore, a pleasant work, because their previous course of language-drill, begun in the Primary Department, and carried on without intermission through all the succeeding stages, will have imparted to them such a command of words, such readiness in varying the structure of a sentence without altering its meaning, as to give them ample facility in expressing their thoughts in natural, simple, and correct language. I was present lately at an examination of a Grammar-class in one of our Western Colleges. It happened that Goold Brown, the book recommended by one of the speakers at the Zanesville convention, was the text-book. It would have been ludicrous, had the waste of time, labor, and intellect not been so mournful, to listen to the pomposity, the solemn verbiage that issued out of the mouths of the demure scholars; the long-winded, formal speech necessary to establish the wonderful fact that it is wrong to say "The pigs is all running about the garden," explaining to an attentive and, no doubt, highly edified audience how "the subject being found in the plural number, it was contrary to rule so and so for the verb to be found in the singular number!" The scholars seemed admirably drilled, and the very intelligent young lady, their instructress, had evidently performed most faithfully the duty imposed on her, however much her irrepressible instinct of common-sense may have inwardly rebelled against the solemn mockery of the irrational process which she was compelled to administer,-a process which could have no other result than filling the minds of the superficial members of the class with emptiness and conceit, and the more thinking ones with disgust at the nonsensical drudgery of committing to memory those endless formularies, and having to repeat them over and over with wearisome repetition for every example, by way of proving what was already so plain, and which a few unpretending words could have settled at once and forever. But it seems to be the aim of the whole system to make the scholars look on every fact in language as depending on some pedantic rule, laid down arbitrarily (for aught they know to the contrary) by grammarians, altogether ignoring the obvious and unalterable law of fitness and harmonious relation. Am I prejudiced and presumptuous in asserting that nine-tenths of the scholars trained after this unnatural and pedantic fashion may indeed succeed in learning by heart (!) the whole pack of rules and exceptions thereunto provided, and may be able glibly to quote chapter and verse for each item, not only without any appreciation of what constitutes beauty of style, but without the least suspicion that Grammar-the analysis of language-is but the application of common sense and of natural logic to the observation and classification of the laws which regulate human speech! O how long will well-meaning and pains-taking teachers continue satisfied to put off their weary pupils with the dry bones of rules, instead of holding up to their delighted view Science herself, glowing with life and beauty! When will the scales fall from their eyes, blinded by prescription and prejudice? When shall it be given to them to see and feel and teach that every subject, whether grammar, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, etc., is but the application of common sense in that particular direction? Shall I be accused of rashness and dogmatism when I assert that scholars, drilled according to the natural method of discovering for themselves the laws of language (grammar) by the study of well-constructed sentences and the building up of sentences of their own after certain prescribed models, will speak and write more correctly, will have a more just appreciation of correctness and beauty of language and a greater readiness in detecting and rectifying deviations from correct usage; that they will actually know more of the spirit and philosophy of grammar than those who have been, according to the orthodox plan, carried (dragged?) through Green or Brown, even if we suppose these works to contain no unwarranted assertions, no inconsistent definitions or illogical divisions, no forced applications (distortions) of the laws of one class of languages, the inflected, as Greek or Latin, to an essentially different family, that of the uninflected, among which the noble English tongue shines preëminent in majestic simplicity. Is the study of abstract grammar, then, to be discarded from our course of studies? By no means. I am only anxious to see it placed in its appropriate rank, where its beauty and power can be appreciated. By the time that, with continual drilling and practice, our scholars have acquired such a command of correct language as may be expected from their age and opportunities, when their logical faculty has been developed by mathematics, etc., being now ripe for the study of mental philosophy-that is, the constitution and working of their own minds,-then indeed, |