are the vastness of the ignorance, the yet uncongenial feeling between the Northern and Southern Italians, in an Italy towhom the idea of unity is still so new; great national prejudices, which though not strong enough to crush the work, are too deeply rooted to be speedily vanquished; and, lastly, Italy's own financial difficulties. She has given a building and 27,000 francs; this is a great deal from her limited purse and halfroused intelligence; but her poverty has increased the difficulty of assuming for the institution from the very first a scale of national importance.

The balance is on the favourable side, and this spring the Italian Government, in consideration of the great utility of the schools, entered into a contract with Mrs. Schwabe to give her the use of the building for thirty years, from May 1876, the date: of expiration of the first term of her original triennially renewable contract.

To appreciate the local effect of this institution you must know Naples. Who in walking along her paved streets has not turned shuddering from carts where a quivering movement suddenly tells that those fifty lambs hung by their four feet to that cart-railing are alive? who has not seen a dying ass urged to do the work of a stout drayhorse? and who on seeing these things at every turn has not felt that they are less within the province of legislation than of such application of righteous principles as shall make all the Italians worthy of their nobler fellow countrymen and of the land in which they dwell.

And when you have seen this cruelty to animals in every street, seen the filth of house and person, and heard the savage cries which stand for language, you should enter the great exCollegio Medico, see the clean children eating a wholesome dinner, replying in decent Italian to their kindly teachers, and welcoming the grey pigeons who confidently strut in for crumbs as the little diners stand at their tables; you should hear a lesson given to these brown children, hear the struggle of dialect and barely organised speech with the mellifluous language that is the birthright of every Italian; you must see the children at play in their gardens.

Nor is the thought absent that Naples is just one of those spots which might become the centre for the spread of fever or cholera, and that only such teaching as the institution gives can raise up a population whose personal habits might lessen this danger, or whose courageous intellect might undertake the extent of required sanitary reform. If selfish consideration have weight with you, lessen the plague spots of the world, for any trading vessel might, in spite of quarantine, bring their evils home to your own doors.

I have only to add a few words on the educational side of the institution: for it is one thing to say that the effort has excited the noblest sympathy and powerful energy wherever it has been brought to the notice of persons best able to judge of the wants it meets, and of the way in which it meets those wants; it is another thing to show that the school is a' model institution.'

The school receives children from the age of three, is prepared to keep them until the age of eighteen, and to give them during that time an education harmonious in principle and calculated to turn out good citizens, good men and women, the fit parents of a new generation.

The wild little Neapolitan is not chained to a form, and stupefied by a grammar: his teachers know better. The senses. reign in his being; they educate first his senses; they train the hand with various occupations progressing in difficulty; they gratify the formative instinct by giving the child clay to model and a garden to dig in; they train his ear by songs and stimulate the germs of his moral nature by maintaining with him a firm and loving tone in daily life.

But excellent as the Kindergarten and elementary schools are--and how successful they are may be judged from the fact that 100 children have recently been refused for want of the needful teachers and means—the institution cannot as a whole be said to be a 'model' until it is completed by an industrial wing and a wing for training teachers.

It is felt that each nation's help should be embodied in some permanent form, such as that of devoting its pecuniary contributions to the establishment in the vast building of that element in the whole of education for which the generous giver is chiefly remarkable in the work of the world. Great Britain is pre-eminent in industry. Let the wing for teaching each child how to earn its bread be founded by England and called the British Industrial Wing.

Germany was the birth-land of Friedrich Fröbel, in accordance with whose ideas the education is conducted. Let the wing for training teachers how to apply those principles be founded by Germany and called the German Fröbel Wing. The institution will thus, in its different parts, express the spirit of international goodwill in which the whole has been conceived; and when Kindergarten, elementary schools, industrial wing, and training wing are all at work, the institution will claim to be called model,' because it will form an organic whole, such as recognises with old Montaigne-‘It is not a mind, it is not a soul, it is not a body which we have to

educate; it is a man, and we ought not to divide him ;' and with Montaigne's fellow countryman Montesquieu, that— It is not a question of getting people to read, but of getting people to think.'

MISCELLANEOUS.

Mr. BARCLAY PHILLIPS read a Paper on the Proposed Amalgamation of University Local and other Examinations.'1 In the year 1857, said the author, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge established a system of examinations for students under 18 years of age, to be held in various parts of England, and which are now generally known as the University Local Examinations.' The first of these Examinations was held by Oxford in June, 1858, at eleven local centres, when 1,150 candidates presented themselves, of whom 40 per cent. passed with success. Cambridge held a similar examination the following December, at eight centres, when 370 boys were examined, of whom 77 per cent. passed. The scheme proved in many respects so successful, that, after a few years, girls were admitted; and a very large number have availed themselves of the privilege, so that last year they formed fully one-third of the candidates. At the present time Oxford holds examinations at 28 and Cambridge at 77 centres, some of which, however, are double centres, that is places where the examinations are held by both Universities, as at Brighton; and at 22 of the Oxford, and 53 of the Cambridge centres, girls as well as boys are admitted. The number of candidates has increased to an enormous extent. Oxford last May examined 1,554 candidates (nearly one-third girls), and Cambridge in December 4,080, of whom rather more than onethird was girls. The result of the last Oxford examination was that 67 per cent. of the candidates passed, and at the Cambridge, 57. Between them the two Universities have from the commencement of the scheme examined nearly 50,000 candidates, of whom upwards of 6,000 were girls. Of the success attending these examinations numerically no doubt can exist. That in many ways they have done good, in raising the standard of education in the schools throughout the country, and improving the methods of teaching, there is also abundant evidence; and, therefore, although they may not be an unmixed good, schoolmasters having now had an extended

1 See Transactions, 1873, p. 317.

experience of their influence, and others practically acquainted with their working, have been considering their defects and in what manner they can be modified so as to render them more generally acceptable and beneficial. Experience has suggested to the University authorities themselves certain minor improvements in matters of detail, but practical teachers take a broader view of the system as a whole. It is, then, rather as the mouth-piece of others, than as expressing merely his own opinions that the author of the present paper, drawn up at the request of the Sussex Educational Association and approved by them, submits their opinions and proposals for consideration and discussion. Examination, as a test of the results of teaching, is no longer a matter of theory, but has been accepted as an established principle. It is enforced in primary schools, and is equally compulsory at the Universities them-selves, and is made obligatory on all candidates for admission into every profession and every department of Government employment. The consequence is that there has grown up a multiplicity of examinations that is becoming most bewildering and inconvenient to those engaged in teaching and injurious in its effects. Thus we have the Civil Service examinations, the examinations for direct commissions, for admission into Woolwich, examination for admission to Cooper's Hill Engineering College, for admission into the Navy, for the London University Matriculation, examination by the Incorporated Law Society for entering articles as solicitor, examination for the College of Surgeons, examination at Apothecary's Hall, examination by the Pharmaceutical Society, examination by the College of Preceptors, examination for Veterinary Surgeons, the Oxford and Cambridge Local Examinations, the Cambridge Higher Local Examinations, the Cambridge Examination of Schools, and to add to the number there has recently been established the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination?' Seventeen different systems of examination are now carried on where it is confidently believed by many of those professionally engaged in the education of youth that one general system, properly graded, would suffice for all. All or most of these examinations are concerned with what may be called Secondary Education,' that is, the education received by boys prior to their entering on the special spheres connected with their several professional or after technical pursuits. To a great extent they answer their purpose as a test of school teaching, and furnish evidence that successful candidates are fit to be admitted as students in their intended profession. Such is unquestionably the case with the Senior Local Examinations.

C

to a limited extent; that is to say, the senior certificate is accepted by the College of Surgeons, the Law Society, and the Pharmaceutical Society as equivalent to their own educational examination, but by no other public bodies. Nevertheless, the success of the Local Examinations and the fact that no general system of examination was in action among the 500 Endowed Grammar Schools, induced the heads of some of the leading public schools to press upon the Universities the propriety of agreeing upon a joint system of examination specially for these schools, as, with a few exceptions, they resolutely refused to enter any of their boys for the Local Examinations, in fact, regarding it as a degradation to be in any way connected with them. In the year 1873, therefore, the two Universities, by special Articles of Agreement,' established what is designated The Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board.' This Board is empowered to appoint persons to examine schools generally, on application from the authorities of them, and to report on the education given in the schools; and also to grant certificates to such candidates as may pass in the necessary subjects, which certificates will entitle their holders, on proceeding to Oxford or Cambridge, to enter at once on their University studies without the necessity of passing an entrance examination at the former, or the examination of the latter. The establishment of this new scheme directed increased attention to the multiplicity of existing examinations, and the following December, at a private conference of the Head Masters of certain county and other schools, a resolution was passed to this effect:-That the efficiency of education was impaired by the variety of preliminary examinations required by different public bodies; that a simple system was desirable; and suggesting that it would be a great service if the Universities would amalgamate their Local Examinations. This led to a second and third conference in London last year, on a more extended scale, of representatives from all the centres in England connected with the Local Examinations. There was a numerous and influential attendance, and communications were received from 49 committees that were not personally represented, when, with regard to the primary question, the inconvenience arising from. the multiplicity of existing examinations, and the desirability of combining the local with the new scheme for the examination of schools, there seemed to be almost perfect unanimity. A communication was subsequently forwarded to the Universities embodying this opinion; also calling their attention to the possible tendency of the new examination to depreciate the