An account of the Military and Naval Schools of different countries, with special reference to the extension and improvement, among ourselves, of similar institutions and agencies, both national and state, for the special training of officers and men for the exigencies of war, was promised by the Editor in his original announcement of “_The American Journal and Library of Education_.” Believing that the best preparation for professional and official service of any kind, either of peace or war, is to be made in the thorough culture of all manly qualities, and that all special schools should rest on the basis, and rise naturally out of a general system of education for the whole community, we devoted our first efforts to the fullest exposition of the best principles and methods of elementary instruction, and to improvements in the organization, teaching, and discipline of schools, of different grades, but all designed to give a proportionate culture of all the faculties. We have from time to time introduced the subject of Scientific Schools--or of institutions in which the principles of mathematics, mechanics, physics, and chemistry are thoroughly mastered, and their applications to the more common as well as higher arts of construction, machinery, manufactures, and agriculture, are experimentally taught. In this kind of instruction must we look for the special training of our engineers, both civil and military; and schools of this kind established in every state, should turn out every year a certain number of candidates of suitable age to compete freely in open examinations for admission to a great National School, like the Polytechnic at Paris, or the purely scientific course of the Military Academy at West Point, and then after two years of severe study, and having been found qualified by repeated examinations, semi-annual and final, by a board composed, not of honorary visitors, but of experts in each science, should pass to schools of application or training for the special service for which they have a natural aptitude and particular preparation.