we breathe, which can be weighed and measured, and that two of them by combining shall produce their exact weight of a substance so unlike them as water! Or if the exercise of a class were to look through a microscope at the leaf of a plant or wing of an insect, and try who could best draw what they had seen and write a description of it in a legible hand and in good English, how many faculties would this call into play compared with the dull routine of parsing a Latin sentence or writing a halting copy of Greek iambics! Even grammar, the one thing which is supposed to be taught thoroughly, is taught so unintelligently that it awakens no interest beyond that of a parrot learning by rote. From ‘propria quæ maribus’ the scholar passes to ‘as in præsenti perfectum format in avi,’ without an attempt to explain what language really means, how it originates from root-words, and how these inflections of ‘as’ and ‘avi’ are part of the devices which certain families of mankind, including our own, have invented as a mechanism for attaching shades of meaning, such as present and past, to the primitive root. Even the alphabet intelligently taught opens up wide fields of interesting matter as to the history of ancient nations, and their successive attempts to analyse the component sounds of their spoken words, and to pass from primitive picture-writing to phonetic symbols. But the instructors of the budding manhood of the _élite_ of the nation, like Gallio, ‘care for none of these things,’ and the organisation of our higher schools seems to be stereotyped on the principle that they are made for teachers rather than for scholars, and that their chief _raison d’être_ is to enable a limited number of highly respectable gentlemen from the Universities to realise comfortable incomes with a maximum of holidays and a minimum of trouble. And the parents support the system because so many of them really reverence rank more than knowledge, and are willing to compound for their sons growing up ignorant, idle, and extravagant, if by any chance they can count a lord or two among their acquaintance. Mr. Francis Galton, in the course of his interesting inquiries as to the effect of heredity and education on character and attainments, took the very practical course of addressing a set of questions to some hundred and eighty of our most distinguished men as to the hereditary qualities of their ancestors, and the various influences which they considered had done most to promote or to retard their success in life. Of course he received a variety of answers, ‘quot homines tot sententiæ,’ but upon one point there was a striking unanimity. ‘They almost all expressed a hatred of grammar and the classics, and an utter distaste for the old-fashioned system of education. There were none who had passed through this old high and dry education who were satisfied with it. Those who came from the greater schools usually did nothing there, and have abused the system heartily.’