In a great many cases where simultaneous answering is practiced, after a short time the evils above specified are allowed to grow, until at last some half a dozen bright members of a class answer for all, the rest dragging after them, echoing their replies, or ceasing to take any interest in an exercise which brings no personal and individual responsibility upon them.  To prevent this, the teacher should exercise double vigilance at such a time.  He should often address questions to individuals alone, especially to those most likely to be inattentive and careless, and guard against the ingress of every abuse which might, without close vigilance, appear.

With these cautions, the method here alluded to will be found to be of very great advantage in many studies; for example, all the arithmetical tables may be recited in this way; words may be spelled, answers to sums given, columns of figures added, or numbers multiplied, and many questions in history, geography, and other miscellaneous studies answered, especially the general questions asked for the purpose of a review.

But, besides being useful as a mode of examination, this plan of answering questions simultaneously is a very important means of fixing in the mind any facts which the teacher may communicate to his pupils.  If, for instance, he says some day to a class that Vasco de Gama was the discoverer of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope, and leaves it here, in a few days not one in twenty will recollect the name.  But let him call upon them all to spell it simultaneously, and then to pronounce it distinctly three or four times in concert, and the word will be very strongly impressed upon their minds.  The reflecting teacher will find a thousand cases in the instruction of his classes, and in his general exercises in the school, in which this principle will be of great utility.  It is universal in its application.  What we say we fix, by the very act of saying it, in the mind.  Hence, reading aloud, though a slower, is a far more thorough method of acquiring knowledge than reading silently, and it is better, in almost all cases, whether in the family, or in Sabbath or common schools, when general instructions are given, to have the leading points fixed in the mind by questions answered simultaneously.

But we are wandering a little from our subject, which is, in this part of our chapter, the methods of examining a class, not of giving or fixing instructions.

Another mode of examining classes, which it is important to describe, consists in requiring written answers to the questions asked.  The form and manner in which this plan may be adopted is various.  The class may bring their slates to the recitation, and the teacher may propose questions successively, the answers to which all the class may write, numbering them carefully.  After a dozen answers are written, the teacher may call at random for them, or he may repeat a question, and ask each pupil to read the