But De la Salle did not stop short at educating the poor; he was the first to found training colleges for masters, and the first to institute regular boarding-schools in which everything relating to commerce, finance, military engineering, architecture, and mathematics was taught, and in which trades could be learned. Besides these, he founded an institution in which agriculture was taught as a science. At St Yon, where the first agricultural school was started, a large garden was devoted to the culture of specimens of fodder-plants, injurious plants, grain, plants peculiar to certain soils, fruits and flowers. The students of to-day study all this, and in addition to working on model farms, visit all the best farms around, are sent with special professors to attend certain markets and sales of live-stock, and have special field-days for practically studying botany, geology, and entomology. The innovations introduced by De la Salle extended to other matters than practical education. Before French boys in his day were allowed to study their own language, they were obliged to learn to read Latin, and thus years were sometimes spent in acquiring a certain facility in reading a language they never understood. De la Salle changed all this, in spite of repeated opposition, and succeeded in making the vernacular tongue the basis of their teaching instead of Latin. Owing to this change, the poor scholars progressed much more rapidly than those in other schools, and the Brothers’ Institutes were soon far ahead of all the elementary schools of their day. The way in which they have held their position even till to-day is shown by the results of the public examinations in Paris during the last thirty-five years. Out of sixteen hundred and thirty-five scholarships offered during this time, pupils of these schools have obtained thirteen hundred and sixteen. This in itself is an enormous proportion; but it is even greater than it appears, when we consider that seculars had more schools, fewer pupils per teacher, and thus a better chance to advance the individual scholar, and as a rule, a richer class of scholars to select from. These scholarship examinations have recently been discontinued, though not until after the Brothers’ pupils were excluded from competition in consequence of the so-called ‘laicisation’ of schools in 1880, after which the Brothers of Paris gave up their government schools and opened voluntary ones.