It is important that an elementary treatise,—more particularly if it profess to be a popular one, intended for the use of beginners as well as for professional students,—should not only give rules, but explain principles also; and unless the latter be clearly defined, the memory alone is exercised, perhaps fatigued, owing to the former being unsupported by adequate reasoning. To confine instruction to bare matter-of-fact is not to simplify, much less to popularize it; since such mode entirely withholds all that explanation which is so necessary for a beginner, who will else probably feel more disheartened than interested. Any study which is presented in its very driest form by being divested of all that imparts interest to the subject, will soon become dry and uninteresting in itself, and prejudice may thus be excited against it at the very outset.

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