A few years ago the British Association appointed a committee of eminent mathematicians to consider ‘the possibility of improving the methods of instruction in elementary geometry.’ The Report of this committee was published in the stout volume which contains the account of the meeting held at Glasgow. It states that the main practical difficulty in effecting the improvement is ‘that of reconciling the claims of the teacher to greater freedom with the necessity of one fixed and definite standard for examination purposes;’ that ‘no text-book yet produced is fit to succeed Euclid in the position of authority, and that a syllabus of propositions in a definite sequence to be regarded as a standard sequence for examination purposes, might be published.’ Such a syllabus as is here implied has been brought out by the Association for the improvement of geometrical teaching; and the committee recommend it for adoption by the universities and other great examining bodies of the United Kingdom. ‘It may be well to observe,’ they say in their Report, ‘that the adoption of this or some such standard syllabus would not necessitate the abandonment of the Elements of Euclid as a text-book by such teachers as still preferred it to any other, as it would at the utmost involve only such supplementary teaching as is contained in the notes appended to many of the editions of Euclid now in use; while it would greatly relieve that large and increasing body of teachers who demand greater freedom in the treatment of geometry than under existing conditions they can venture to adopt.’ Supplementary to our recent notices of the telephone, the following remarks, translated from a late number of the _Telegraph Bulletin_ of the Ottoman administration, and dealing with a question of some importance to telegraph manipulators throughout the world, may be read with interest: