This was rather an awkward question to address to theologians, and the ministerial members of the mission were much perplexed. Instruction in soap-making had not been part of their college training, and they knew little about it. ‘After a short pause, the senior member of the mission asked Mr. J. Cameron whether he could give an answer to that question. Mr. Cameron replied: “Come back in a week, and we may give an answer to Her Majesty’s inquiry.” At the end of the week they returned, and Mr. Cameron presented them with two small bars of tolerably good soap made entirely from materials found in the island[4].’ This incident, along with the conversations which the missionaries had with Her Majesty’s messengers, arrested for a time the backward trend of things. It revealed to Her Majesty and her heathen advisers their want of knowledge about the most common things, and their need of the most elementary education, and led to further inquiries about various matters. The tone adopted towards the missionaries and the treatment of them and their converts became more gentle and considerate. The queen herself was so pleased with the soap that, on condition that Mr. Cameron would undertake a contract to supply the palace and the government with a certain amount of soap, and teach some of the young noblemen how to make it, things were to be allowed to go on; and the missionaries were not to be interfered with in their work. Mr. Cameron and Mr. Chick, another of the artisan missionaries, undertook contracts for soap-making and the production of other useful articles. The government wanted them to undertake a contract for making gunpowder; but this they declined. It took nearly five years to fulfil this agreement. Perhaps their brethren had given Messrs. Cameron[5] and Chick a hint to deal out their instruction as to the soap-making in homoeopathic doses, so that they might be able to accomplish as much as possible of their higher service to Madagascar before the end of the period at which the contracts expired. One most important result to the mission from these contracts was a fresh impulse to the work of education throughout the central province. New schools were allowed to be established, and, although the queen and government would have much preferred to patronize merely secular education, had the missionaries agreed to separate it from religious teaching, they were constrained for the sake of the secular instruction to sanction and countenance the religious education.