"But here a curious difficulty had to be surmounted. It is easy enough to construct presses from iron or wood that will work regularly; but with examination presses that is altogether a different affair. Especially with regard to those for the higher branches of education the matter is not so easily procurable. And then there is another thing; neither are the examiners composed of wood and iron, nor are the students that have to be examined usually made of linseed; both classes of persons are more likely to be rational beings; the contract between them entails action and reaction, with thousandfold variations, so that there can never be any question of absolutely comparable results, least of all when the examiners and the examined are more or less strangers to each other. Leaving out other difficulties, there would still remain the very natural resistance which such heterogeneous elements would exercise towards each other, a resistance which will always be commensurate with the greater or lesser difference of interests in the parties concerned. "In order now to overcome this difficulty, and to save the principle that "those aspiring to equal rights should satisfy equal conditions," the Government issued certain text-books in the form of examination guides. And what was the consequence? Industrious persons arose, and contrived to invent means by which to make those works essentially practical, and the examinations as light as possible; they composed little books containing questions and answers, something like catechisms, for every branch of science. This appeared to some people to be the height of examinatorial equality; but when, in spite of all this, the same complaints continued to be heard about the unfairness and arbitrary ways of examiners, the still more novel idea was mooted, whether it was not possible to solve the examination problem by a direct method, viz., physico-mechanically. For a long time past we had had speculums for the eye, for the ear, for the throat, etc.; why should we not succeed in inventing a speculum for the brain? There were already self-registering thermometers, barometers, magnetometers, photometers, etc.; why should we not have the self-registering enkephalometer? machines which in a few minutes, and by means of a few figures, would indicate the exact degree and amount of knowledge acquired by the individual to whose cerebrum the instrument might be applied! What a splendid invention, both for examiners and candidates, this would have been! Unfortunately the thing always proved impracticable; and the idea now ranks with the visions of perpetual motion and squaring of the circle. University Education.