There is unanimous testimony as to the undue amount of time given to accomplishments, music in particular. There are some elaborate calculations as to the total number of hours spent on acquiring a mechanical skill on the piano, though about a third of the pupils never make the slightest use of it after they have left school. The music played is bad; there is little training for the taste and none for the mind in this study to which girls devote almost as much time as their brothers do to classics. Next to music modern languages absorbed most of the time and energies of the pupils, and yet the Commissioners unanimously report with severity on the results attained. Very few girls could compose a French sentence correctly; slipshod grammar and bad pronunciation are noted, and set down to the habit of speaking French out of school hours, by which a sort of jargon was developed incomprehensible to an outsider, and not even up to the standard of Stratford-atte-Bowe. On the subject of Science Mr. Fitch wrote: ‘Few things are sadder than to see how the sublimest of all physical sciences is vulgarised in ladies’ schools. No subject, if properly taught, is better calculated to exalt the imagination and to kindle large thoughts in a pupils mind. Yet all the grandeur and vastness are eliminated from the study of Astronomy as commonly pursued; and the pupils whose attention has never been directed to any one of the great laws by which the universe is governed, think they are learning astronomy when they are twisting a globe round and round, and solving a few problems in latitude and longitude.’