and the difference between this knowledge, and that which we call an understanding of the word or thing, is, for the most part, only in degree.  Definitions and explanations are doubtless highly useful, but induction is not definition, and an understanding of words may be acquired without either; else no man could ever have made a dictionary.  But, granting the principle to be true, it makes nothing for this puerile method of induction; because the regular process by definitions and examples is both shorter and easier, as well as more effectual.  In a word, this whole scheme of inductive grammar is nothing else than a series of leading questions and manufactured answers; the former being generally as unfair as the latter are silly.  It is a remarkable tissue of ill-laid premises and of forced illogical sequences.

22.  Of a similar character is a certain work, entitled, “English Grammar on the Productive System:  a method of instruction recently adopted in Germany and Switzerland.”  It is a work which certainly will be “productive” of no good to any body but the author and his publishers.  The book is as destitute of taste, as of method; of authority, as of originality.  It commences with “the inductive process,” and after forty pages of such matter as is described above, becomes a “productive system,” by means of a misnamed “RECAPITULATION;” which jumbles together the etymology and the syntax of the language, through seventy-six pages more.  It is then made still more “productive” by the appropriation of a like space to a reprint of Murray’s Syntax and Exercises, under the inappropriate title, “GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.”  To Prosody, including punctuation and the use of capitals, there are allotted six pages, at the end; and to Orthography, four lines, in the middle of the volume! (See p. 41.) It is but just, to regard the title of this book, as being at once a libel and a lie; a libel upon the learning and good sense of Woodbridge;[60] and a practical lie, as conveying a false notion of the origin of what the volume contains.

23.  What there is in Germany or Switzerland, that bears any resemblance to this misnamed system of English Grammar, remains to be shown.  It would be prodigal of the reader’s time, and inconsistent with the studied brevity of this work, to expose the fallacy of what is pretended in regard to the origin of this new method.  Suffice it to say, that the anonymous and questionable account of the “Productive System of Instruction,” which the author has borrowed from a “valuable periodical,” to save himself the trouble of writing a preface, and, as he says, to “assist [the reader] in forming an opinion of the comparative merits of the system” is not only destitute of all authority, but is totally irrelevant, except to the whimsical name of his book.  If every word of it be true, it is insufficient to give us even the slightest reason to suppose, that any