The right education, it was thought, for girls, was one of accomplishments and of routine work, with conversational knowledge of French. The ideal of a girl's character was that she was to be merely amiable, ready to please and be pleased; it was, as was somewhat severely said by one of the Assistant Commissioners, not to be good and useful when married, but to _get_ married. There was no ideal for single women. They did not realize how much of the work of the world must go undone unless there is a large class of highly educated single women. This view of girls' education is not yet extinct. Corresponding to the ideal on the part of the ordinary British parent was, of course, the school itself. There was no high ideal of physical health, and but little belief that it depended on physical conditions; therefore the schools were neither large and airy, nor well provided with recreation ground; not games and play, but an operation known as "crocodiling" formed the daily and wearisome exercise of girls. That defect also is common still. There was no ideal of art, or belief in the effect of artistic surroundings, and therefore the schools were unpretending even to ugliness and meanness. The walls were not beautified with pictures, nor were the rooms furnished with taste. There was no high ideal of cultivating the intelligence, and therefore most of the lessons that were not devoted to accomplishments, such as music, flower-painting, fancy work, hand-screen making, etc., were given to memory work, and note-books, in which extracts were made from standard authors and specimen sums worked with flourishes wondrous to behold. The serious study of literature and history was almost unknown. The memory work consisted in many schools in learning Mangnall's Questions and Brewer's Guide to Science--fearful books. The first was miscellaneous: What is lightning? How is sago made? What were the Sicilian Vespers, the properties of the atmosphere, the length of the Mississippi, and the Pelagian heresy? These are, I believe, actual specimens of the questions; and the answers were committed to memory. About twenty-five years ago I examined some girls in Brewer's Guide to Science. The verbal knowledge of some of them was quite wonderful; their understanding of the subject absolutely _nil_. They could rattle off all about positive and negative electricity, and Leyden jars and batteries; but the words obviously conveyed no ideas whatever, and they cheerfully talked utter nonsense in answer to questions not in the book.