God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out.
—Robert Browning.
CHAPTER IX.
THE STUDY OF PICTURES
Children delight in pictures. Every child-lover knows how intently and with what delight the baby’s eyes gaze upon the pages of the beloved picture book, long before the words which describe the picture can be spoken or even understood by the young student. The childish chatter is an attempt to express the delight in the treasure and the thoughts suggested by the picture.
As the child grows older, pictures continue to be a source of pleasure. He names the familiar objects, talks about them, asks questions about them. Thus he unconsciously grows in the power to see and to tell what he sees, taught by the many willing helpers who turn the pages of his book and interpret its pictures.
Many a new idea creeps into the child’s mind by the path of the picture book. Many an object which would be entirely foreign to his experience otherwise, becomes familiar through its pages. Every new book put into his hands is first challenged by him to discover whether it contains pictures, and it is the pictures that first excite his desire to learn to read the story which they illustrate.
We cannot estimate the contribution which such books make to both knowledge and vocabulary. Most of us can think of scenes which we know only through their pictured semblances, yet seem to know well. We can remember our first glimpses of scenes that pictures had made familiar. How friendly, how well known they seemed! How we were used to them! Niagara, Westminster Abbey, the Pyramids, the Alps, are known to many of us only through pictures. Are we entirely ignorant, then, of their beauty or their grandeur? When our eyes first look upon them, shall we not greet them as already a part of our possession?