With all these varieties of organisation and character, the schools have a unifying influence in the general control of the Central Board, since all are subject to its examination and inspection. The latter is undertaken by the Chief Inspector, who visits each school in the course of the year, and reports specially on the following heads— 1. Character, suitability, and capacity of school premises. 2. School furniture and apparatus. 3. Facilities for recreation and physical training. 4. The relation between the administration of schools and the schemes under which they are established. 5. The organisation of classes. 6. The school discipline. 7. Courses of instruction. If a school prove deficient in any of these respects, the managers receive a warning from the Board that future negligence will entail a diminution of the grant. This is a useful check, and a form of payment by result which can only do good, for it counteracts that uneconomical form of economy, which declines to spend on proper building and apparatus and salaries. An element of control which requires more careful exercise is the threat of a diminished grant, should a school fail to do well in the annual examination. This, which is conducted by the Central Board, was in the first place inspectional, and was meant to give the schools the necessary outside impulse. In order to carry out the principle of letting the examination follow the teaching instead of the teaching the examination, each school was invited to send up its own syllabus of work done, but this led to so much needless expense, since there were as many as fifty-three Latin papers set in one year, that some kind of uniformity became indispensable. The present regulations prescribe that only pupils who have been a full year in a school shall be presented for the written examination, and in at least five subjects. Forms which do not take papers are examined orally in one or other of the subjects studied during the school year. The scheme bears some resemblance to the school examinations of the Joint Board, but a new feature is the test in languages of ‘ability to read fluently, intelligently, and correctly, passages chosen from prepared and unprepared texts.’ The papers set are of varying grades of difficulty, and the schools choose which they will take. Thus in Latin there were seven papers set in 1898, of which the fourth is supposed to be equivalent to the standard of the Welsh Matriculation. Not many pupils are likely to go beyond this, since the schools are distinctly preparatory to the university colleges, which a matriculated pupil can enter. If this standard should in a few years be reached by a fair proportion of pupils in each school, the intermediate system can claim to be successful, for it will be accomplishing its avowed purpose, to carry its pupils from the Fifth Standard to the Constituent College of the University of Wales. For pupils who aim at the Welsh Matriculation