SPELLING-BOOK,

OR,

.SECOND COURSE OF LESSONS

IN

SPELLING AND READING.

DESIGNED AS A

SEQUEL TO THE AUTHOR'S PRIMER, AND AN INTRODUCTION
TO THE OTHER PARTS OF HIS ELEMENTARY AND
COMMON-SCHOOL SERIES.

ENLARGED EDITION.

BY WILLIAM RUSSELL,

PRINCIPAL OF MERRIMACK, N. H., NORMAL INSTITUTE; ED. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION,
(FIRST SERIES ;) AUTHOR OF LESSONS IN ENUNCIATION, ETC.

BOSTON:

JOHN M. WHITTEMORE & CO

PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.

HARVARD
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1844, by

WILLIAM RUSSELL,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

INTRODUCTORY OBSERVATIONS

THE present condition of our language, presents, as teachers are well aware, a formidable stumbling-block, at the very threshold of education. It exhibits a wide discrepance between the established orthography of numerous classes of words, as they appear to the eye, and their orthoëpy, or appropriate utterance to the ear. The former, owing to the comparative durability of written language, remains more nearly as it was in a past period of our literature; while the latter has departed, in many instances, so widely from the former, that there is, sometimes, rather an utter dissimilarity, than any resemblance, between the two. The learner, therefore, when attempting to combine the letters and syllables of such words, finds an insurmountable difficulty in the fact, that the names of letters afford, in these instances, no guidance to their sounds, and that the combination of them to the ear, has no correspondence with the characters presented to the eye.

The embarrassment arising from these causes, has induced some teachers to throw aside, entirely, the use of the process of spelling, as an aid to the teaching of reading, and has led them to rely, wholly, on arbitrary association and frequent repetition, as the only means of securing the learner's progress. This practice, however, is founded on a view of the anomalies and exceptions, not the analogies and rules, of our language. In teaching the former, we may well dispense with the practice of spelling and syllabication, any farther than as a mere enumeration of the constituent letters of a word, and a security for the exact recognition of them. But in teaching the latter, the process of spelling, if connected, as it ought always to be, with the practice of articulating the sounds of letters, in conjunction with their names, becomes a rational and sure guide to pronunciation, and a most effectual and expeditious.