FABLES FOR THE INSTRUCTION OF YOUTH PUBLISHED IN BOSTON IN 1818
Thomas E. Cone Jr. M.D.
In the early years of the nineteenth century William Perry's The Only Sure Guide to the English Tongue, published by Isaiah Thomas, Jr., was the most widely used speller and reader in New England schools (Fig. 1). The two things in Perry's book that were said to have most impressed those who learned to spell and read from it were the frontispiece (Fig. 2) and the collection of fables.
The frontispiece shows a tree of learning growing in a schoolyard, and groups of boys playing in its shadow. A ladder reaches into the branches and several boys with open books in their hands are climbing up the ladder into branches of the tree.
The illustrated fables found toward the end of Perry's book were studied and memorized by almost all New England school children a century and a half ago. Perry's choice of fables, one of which will be published each month, will offer an excellent view of the kind of moral instruction our children were once taught.1
