Pagina:A First Latin Reader.pdf/3

Haec pagina emendata et bis lecta est
PREFACE

With the Primer previously published, this Reader provides for a course of study leading up to Caesar or some other author of like difficulty. Students who are to give five years or more to preparatory Latin would normally devote a year each to the Primer and the Reader; but the maturer pupils in the four-year course will cover easily in their first year the work outlined in both books.

It is hoped too, that, aside from use in this regular sequence, the Reader will be found to meet the needs of many teachers who are looking for a carefully graded text for supplementary reading or for translation at sight.

The plan for “beginning Latin” embodied in Primer and Reader differs from others most fundamentally, perhaps, in that it concentrates so definitely upon the problem of developing the student's power to read Latin; and it is quite in harmony with that general design that this second book is called a “Reader,” and that in it the Latin-English exercises are massed at one point, with notes at the foot of the page.

Teachers using the Reader can best cooperate toward realizing the writer's aim if each recitation period is divided definitely into two parts, the first to be devoted, without distraction, to the business of learning to read, the other being reserved for grammatical drill and for composition work, oral or written. In this way, without loss in any essential particular, it will be found possible to bring the student along, by natural stages, to the point where he will