This discovery of the employer, of the potentialities of women's work in the engineering trades, soon led to a development of the instruction of female students in the Training Centres; more advanced machine work was added to the curriculum, as well as tuition in aeroplane woodwork and construction, in core-making and moulding, in draughtsmanship and electrical work, in optical-instrument making, including the delicate and highly-skilled work of lens and prism making. New Training Centres are constantly being opened in provincial areas, the instruction being adapted to the needs of local factories. There are now (December, 1917) over forty training schools for engineering work in Great Britain, as well as nine instructional factories and workshops, and the proportion of women to men trained in all the processes may be reckoned roughly as two to one. The system of instruction is based, in some of the Centres, on the general principle that the School undertakes the preliminary work of tuition in the simpler engineering processes; the Instructional Factory, or workshop, specializing in the more skilled processes, acts as a clearing-house for promising students from the schools. The urgency of warfare does not, however, permit the application of any hard-and-fast rules. I have seen specimens of some of the most 'advanced' work produced in a School; indeed, the delicate work of lens polishing and centring, the intricacies of engineering draughtsmanship, the precise art of tool-setting and gauge-making have become specialisms of the Schools in certain localities. [Illustration: TURNING THE COPPER BAND OF A 9.2-INCH HIGH-EXPLOSIVE SHELL] [Illustration: DRILLING SAFETY-PIN HOLE IN FUSE] [Illustration: INSPECTING AND GAUGING FUSES] [Illustration: TURNING THE OUTSIDE AND FORMING THE NOSE-END OF A 9.2-INCH HIGH-EXPLOSIVE SHELL] As I write, the face of an eager girl of 21 years recurs to memory. She was showing me, the other day, a master gauge produced at a School in the Eastern counties. 'I made it all myself,' she said joyfully, 'dead exact, and all the other gauges of this size in the School are made from it. I have just been appointed assistant instructor in gauge-making.' When it is recalled that the deviation in the measurements of a gauge is only tolerated within such limits as a 3/10000 part of an inch, the production in a School of a master gauge, 'dead exact' in all its dimensions, is a proof that the student has already gone some way in the mastery of the craft of the engineer. _The Instructional Factory_ On the other hand, the Instructional Factory is often forced by war conditions to enrol raw recruits who seem likely material for the urgent needs of surrounding factories. In such cases, the candidate is placed on trial for a week or two in the Instructional Workshop, as in the School. If, at the close of the period of probation, she is deemed unsuitable, she is advised at that preliminary stage to return to her former occupation.