them could examine a teacher, test his or her qualification, pretty much as they deemed best, and grant a certificate, available only for one school and one year, it is true, but nevertheless renewable, and answering every purpose of the certificate of to-day. It is not difficult to imagine a much more easy and varying examination, under such circumstances, than that which an improved system soon rendered necessary, and the quality of teachers so produced need not be further particularized. We have thus obtained some glimpse of the THEN of our educational facilities of a generation ago. The picture might be elaborated. It would be easy to fill in details from memory; to tell how the blind oft times led the blind; how the ignorant teacher insured the ignorant pupil; and how "schooling" was frequently a farce, and mere waste of time.... GREAT EDUCATIONAL ADVANCE MADE BY THE PROVINCE OF ONTARIO SINCE 1847. That the Province has made enormous strides in population, wealth, intelligence and importance, during the last thirty years, admits of no doubt. Our forests have disappeared, an improved system of agriculture has followed, manufactories have sprung up, railways have connected every county, a daily press has become an established and indispensable institution, the telegraph has economized time by practically annihilating distance, while numerous inventions and discoveries have created new wants, and supplied as rapidly as they have made them. Without losing our characteristic love of hard work--I here speak of everybody in general, and nobody in particular, and purposely avoid all personal allusions--and that industrial enterprise which springs from it, we have become a reading and much more cultured people. The scholar, endowed with physical capacity equal to that possessed by an illiterate competitor, is worth more than he in the factory, the workshop, the store, the mill, the mine, or on the sea or farm. Cultivated brain has a market value, and book learning is no longer despised, or regarded with half contempt, as the mark distinguishing the mere dreamer from the worker. To possess the "Reason Why" is no proof now-a-days of physical and practical inferiority; to know a little of everything, and everything of something, is not now the peculiar privilege of the English Gentleman. Little wonder is there, therefore, that what the school has helped to bring about, should tend to make the school more valued. That such has been its effect we have but to look around to see. Where in 1847, we, in Upper Canada, had 2,863 school houses, our last returns show that we possess more than 5,000, and while the number has so largely increased the advance in value has been in much greater proportion. In 1847 we had, in all Upper Canada, but 49 school-houses built of brick; now we boast of 1,569 built of that material, or over thirty times as many. In 1847 we had eighty-four constructed of stone; now we claim more than 500.