As to the teaching of handicraft, the methods were quite different from those which proved a failure at the Cornell University, and differed, in fact, from those used in most technical schools. The student was not sent to a workshop to learn some special handicraft and to earn his existence as soon as possible; but the teaching of technical skill was prosecuted in the same systematical way as laboratory work is taught in the universities, according to a scheme elaborated by the founder of the school, M. Dellavos, and now applied at Chicago and Boston. It is evident that drawing was considered as the first step in technical education. Then the student was brought, first, to the carpenter’s workshop, or rather laboratory, and there he was thoroughly taught to execute all kinds of carpentry and joinery. They did not teach the pupil to make some insignificant work of house decoration, as they do in the system of the _slöjd_--the Swedish method, which is taught especially at the Nääs school--but they taught him, to begin with, to make very accurately a wooden cube, a prism, a cylinder (with the planing jack), and then--all fundamental types of joining. In a word, he had to study, so to say, the philosophy of joinery by means of manual work. No efforts were spared in order to bring the pupil to a certain perfection in that branch--the real basis of all trades. Later on, the pupil was transferred to the turner’s workshop, where he was taught to make in wood the patterns of those things which he would have to make in metal in the following workshops. The foundry followed, and there he was taught to cast those parts of machines which he had prepared in wood; and it was only after he had gone through the first three stages that he was admitted to the smith’s and engineering workshops. Such was the system which English readers will find described in full in a work by Mr. Ch. H. Ham.[187] As for the perfection of the mechanical work of the students, I cannot do better than refer to the reports of the juries at the above-named exhibitions.