M. Demolins complains that the French rely too much on stiff examinations as a test of knowledge, and a French youth writes me on this subject: “We have a great many schools in France; as many as there are professions, since nobody who has not spent two or three years in some sort of school, and undergone innumerable examinations, can hope to do anything. For instance, I have undergone nine examinations, and it is not even over! Naturally, I only refer to necessary examinations. They begin at the age of fifteen or sixteen. Before that period you must have been at a _lycée_ or college. A _lycée_ is a government establishment, and a college belongs to its township. The training is identical, but the college professors are less well paid. Their inferiority to the _lycée_ professors lies in the fact that they have not undergone so many examinations as these, or, perhaps, only have come out of them less successfully. In the _lycées_ and colleges there are two methods—the literary or old method, and the scientific or new one. The old method is general: literature, geography, history, German or English (never both), Latin, Greek, mathematics, every year; in the first years only zoölogy, botany, and geology, and in the last years philosophy. But always the most important thing is Latin. The youth who has gone through the course of philosophy has learnt Latin for seven years, Greek for five years and a half, but, knowing that his Latin will be of no service to him after he has passed his _baccalauréat_, as soon as he thinks he knows enough for that examination—and he thinks so at an early hour—he flings his Latin books at the head of his professor or recklessly goes to sleep upon them, if he be working merely for place as a bureaucrat; and I, for one, have not the heart to blame him. Unfortunately, it is the same thing for German, and English, and everything else. Amongst a hundred young men in the philosophy class, not more than two will understand or speak German, and never more than one will speak English. Amongst a hundred French youths speaking German or English you will find that ninety-nine have spent some years in Germany or England; the hundredth is a phenomenon. Besides, it is fashionable to-day in France not to know a word of a foreign tongue. The scientific method is less general than the literary method. It comprises chiefly sciences and modern languages—German, English, Spanish, and Italian. It is certainly more serious than the other. There is a _baccalauréat_, too, but unlike the literary _baccalauréat_, which is an aim, the scientific _baccalauréat_ is only the means of arriving at an aim. The literary _baccalauréat_ leads to nothing, or to the law school, which is almost the same thing, for, speaking generally, the students have no other object than the avoidance of the three years’ military service.” The scientific _baccalauréat_ leads to the Polytechnique school, to St. Cyr, or to the school of