willing to leave their children at school as long as the school was willing to keep them. In this way the ex-seventh standard developed into the Higher Grade Elementary school. This name belongs properly to two different types of school. The Higher Grade proper begins at the fifth standard, and gives an education for three or four years beyond the seventh. But the term is also applied to a school which includes all the standards, and gives more advanced instruction to a small number of pupils who remain after passing through these. The latter is the kind usually found in London; the former is popular in large manufacturing towns, especially in the north, and it is this which is stepping in to fill an important gap in the secondary system of the country. These schools mark the existence of a new and vigorous educational impulse arising from below. They are a natural, though apparently unexpected, development of the elementary school, which, according to the words of the Act, is one ‘at which elementary education is the principal part of the education there given.’ Since the great mass of children do not go beyond the fifth standard, it is convenient in large towns to draw into a single school all who propose to continue their education, and by a systematic course of further study to encourage them to stay on as long as possible. Thus a secondary school has grown up so naturally and quietly on the top of the elementary, that many persons are hardly aware of its existence. This sudden addition of a four years’ advanced course would obviously be impossible without funds, and the Education Department is officially unaware of the existence of any pupils beyond the seventh standard. The good fairy who steps in here is none other than that much abused South Kensington Department of Science and Art. This department, which, justly or unjustly, has come to be regarded as a red-tape-bound machine for examining and conferring grants by a sort of automatic process, has only of late years been brought into connection with day-schools. Though its grants began as early as 1837, their object was chiefly to encourage evening classes, and make cheap instruction possible for those men and women whose occupation or income shut them out from the ordinary means of education. An examination which could be used for the purpose of earning income naturally became popular; and in spite of protests from many quarters, in particular from some artists, who regarded the system of drawing-teaching as mechanical and cramping, there has been little diminution in its popularity as a money-producing agency. The establishment of technical institutes gave it a fresh impulse, since the adoption by these of the South Kensington examinations gave a welcome addition to the institute’s funds; and as the money for this purpose is supplied by annual votes in the Estimates, and not by a rate, it provokes none of that opposition which a local rate for any object, no