The history examiners have also made a point of introducing questions characterized by their timeliness, about Alfred the Great in the year when the thousandth anniversary of his death was being celebrated, in 1904 on the Louisiana Purchase, in 1909 on Grover Cleveland, questions which it was expected would receive unusually full treatment. The expectation was disappointed, possibly because their “timeliness” did not exist for the candidate; because current events have had no share of his attention, though they might be taking the form of celebration of the past. As for current events pure and simple, those that belong to the present _per se_, any option on them is avoided. The only subject of current interest on which information has seemed to be widespread was the melodramatic experience of Miss Ellen Stone. Allied to this ignorance of current events, is the ignorance of the nineteenth century in Modern history and in English history. A candidate could write a passable account of Charlemagne and fail on Bismarck, could be accurate about Wolsey and yet state that Gladstone wrote standard law books. For this knowledge of the remote past and ignorance of the recent present, Dr. James Sullivan says that the text-books should be held responsible, as few teachers are any better than their text-books. In biography, whenever the options made it possible to write on several persons rather than on one, the greater majority of the candidates found it easier to present a few meagre facts about several individuals than an extended account of one individual. Evidently biography in school is confined to the foot notes or the descriptive introductory paragraph on the page that mentions a new leader for the first time. In fact one student apologized for his limited knowledge of Pitt and Nelson on the ground that Montgomery gives no extended biographies. Like Dr. Sullivan, he blamed the text-book. It should not be implied that the reader finds no evidence of collateral reading. Indications of it do appear, but they are rarer than oases in Sahara. Far from hinting at collateral reading, many answers showed inadequate attention to the slender material offered in the text-book. It seems not unreasonable to expect that every student going up for examination in English history should be able to place Milton and Nelson correctly, yet their names have brought out such statements as, there is nothing recorded in history showing any personal service that Milton did for the Roundheads and that personally he was a Tory, that Milton wrote books of travel and wild improbable adventures of sea and land; that Nelson explored for England and went furthest north, that he sunk the Spanish Armada, that he defeated the combined French and Spanish navies at Waterloo, and that he signaled, “Don’t give up the ship.” The only satisfactory item to be credited to these statements is the fixed association of these names respectively with literature and the sea. Any hint as