Tickled by a mother who wanted to teach botany to her four-year-old daughter, Rousseau composed eight letters between 1771 and 1772, which are as many lessons, given that, in each letter he deals with the study of a family of plants, starting from the observation of a flower and then deriving its general characteristics. Rousseau did not have any visual support but, with his well-known wis¬dom, and only using language, he created a small masterpiece that could be defined as ante litteram distance education. This article reconstructs the teaching aspects implicitly used by Rousseau and means to show how his is not a simple report of information, but a great lesson in teaching methods for the development of observation skills and lexical development.
Keywords: Teaching, botanics, lexicon, rhetoric, observation.