be weak inventions of the enemy. Many of the comicalities in the way of examination answers recorded by her Majesty’s inspectors of schools, the examiners in the school board scholarships competitions, and other the like official personages, go a long way to prove that in examination blundering, as in many other matters, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. At least, it seems to us that no invented story—supposing examination stories ever are invented—could equal for “nice derangement” the following written answer which was actually given at an examination in the “specific subjects” in a public elementary school within the metropolitan area. The specific subject taken was physiology, and the children “presented” in it were asked to “describe the processes of digestion,” which one of them did in this wise: “Food is digested by the action of the lungs. Digestion is brought on by the lungs having something the matter with them. The food then passes through your windpipe to the pores, and thus passes off your body by evaporation, through a lot of little holes in your skin called capillaries. The food is nourished in the stomach. If you were to eat anything hard you would not be able to digest it, and the consequence would be you would have indigestion. The gall-bladder throws off juice from the food which passes through it. We call the kidneys the bread-basket, because it is where all the bread goes to. They lay up concealed by the heart.” Domestic economy, as nowadays taught to “children of the elementary school class,” embraces a good deal of physiological knowledge, or rather, as applied to such children, physiological jargon. It is a subject which affords hosts of amusing answers, though, from considerations of space, two or three must here suffice for specimens. Thus, in reply to the question, “Why do we cook our food?” one girl gives the delightfully inconsequent reply: “Their of five ways of cooking potatoes. We should die if we eat our food roar.” Another girl writes: “The function of food is to do its proper work in the body. Its proper work is to well masticate the food, and it goes through without dropping, instead of being pushed down by the skin.” A third domestic economy pupil puts in her examination paper that “food digested is when we put it into our mouths, our teeth chews it, and our tongue roll it down into our body.… We should not eat so much bone-making foods as flesh-forming and warmth-giving foods, for if we did we would have too many bones, and that would make us look funny.” On the subject of ventilation, one student informs us that a room should be kept at ninety in the winter by a fire; in the summer by a thermometer: while a classmate writes: “A thermometer is an instrument used to let out the heat when it is going to be cold.” Another girl sets down: “When roasting a piece of beef place it in front of a brisk fire, so as to congratulate the outside.” But an