What I should think more reasonable would be some such arrangement as the following. There might be a board of thoroughly competent examiners for each branch of study separately, authorized to confer certificates of competence. When a man believed himself to have mastered a branch of study, he would go and try to get a certificate for that. The various studies would then be followed according to the public sense of their importance, and would fall quite naturally into the rank which they ought to occupy at any given period of the national history. These separate examinations should be severe enough to ensure a serviceable degree of proficiency. Nobody should be allowed to teach anything who had not got a certificate for the particular thing he intended to profess. In the confusion of your present system, not only do you fail to insure the thoroughness of pupils, but the teachers themselves are too frequently incompetent in some speciality which accidentally fails to their share. I think that a Greek master ought to be a complete Hellenist, but surely it is not necessary that he should be half a mathematician. To sum up. It seems to me that a Government has no business to favor some intellectual pursuits more than others, but that it ought to recognize competent attainment in every one of them by a sort of diploma or certificate, leaving the relative rank of different pursuits to be settled by public opinion. And as to the educators themselves, I think that when a man has proved his competence in one thing, he ought to be allowed to teach that one thing in the University without being required to pass an examination in any other thing. LETTER VII. TO THE PRINCIPAL OF A FRENCH COLLEGE. Loss of time to acquire an ancient language too imperfectly for it to be useful--Dr. Arnold--Mature life leaves little time for culture--Modern indifference to ancient thinking--Larger experience of the moderns--The moderns older than the ancients--The Author's regret that Latin has ceased to be a living language--The shortest way to learn to read a language--The recent interest in modern languages--A French student of Hebrew.