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Industrial schools, compulsory education, these seem to us usually modern ideas; but these old teachers knew something of object teaching, of adapting methods to varying conditions. Thus:

They completed the instruction by the use of signs, and it may be imagined that the result was little or nothing. Desirous of hastening the instruction and realizing that what enters by the eye engraves itself more easily upon the mind, they devised the idea of painting the mysteries of religion upon a canvas. Friar Jacob de Tastera, a Frenchman, was the first, it seems, who tested this method. He did not know the language, but he showed the Indians the chart and caused one of the brighter among them, who knew something of Spanish, to explain the meaning of the figures to the others. The other friars followed his example and the system continued in use much time. They were also accustomed to hang the necessary charts upon the wall, and the missionary, as he made the doctrinal explanations, indicated with a pointer the corresponding chart. The Indians accustomed to painting hieroglyphs adopted them for writing catechisms and prayerbooks for their own use, but varying the old form and interspersing here and there words written with European letters, from which there resulted a new species of mixed writing, of which curious examples are preserved, some of which are in my possession. They made use of the same method of jotting down a record of their sins that they might not forget them at the time of going to the confessional. The use of the pictures was so pleasing to the Indians that it lasted all that century and a part of the following. In 1575 Archbishop Moya de Contreras substituted with announcements in pictures, papal bulls which failed to come from Spain; and the well known French writer, Friar Juan Bautista, caused figures to be engraved—after the seventeenth century had begun—for use in teaching the Indians of that time the doctrine.