duplicated it, and, as a rule, duplicated it badly, for it was not intelligible to the pupil. The authors of these text-books, adopting the traditional methods of "abridgments," endeavoured to accumulate the greatest possible number of facts by omitting all their characteristic details and summarising them in the most general, and therefore vague, expressions. In the elementary books nothing was left but a residue of proper names and dates connected by formulæ of a uniform type; history appeared as a series of wars, treaties, reforms, revolutions, which only differed in the names of peoples, sovereigns, fields of battle, and in the figures giving the years.
Such, down to the end of the Second Empire, was historical instruction in all French institutions, both secular and ecclesiastical—with a few exceptions, whose merit is measured by their rarity, for in those days a professor of history needed a more than common share of energy and initiative to rise above the routine of rédaction and summary.
II. In recent times the general movement of educational reform, which began in the Department and the Faculties, has at last extended to secondary instruction. The professors of history have been emancipated from the jealous supervision which weighed on their teaching under the government of the Empire, and have taken the opportunity to make trial of new methods. A system of historical pedagogy has been devised. It has been revealed with the approbation of the Department in the discussions of the society for the study of questions of secondary education, in the Revue de l'enseignement secondaire, and in the Revue universitaire. It has received official sanction in the Instructions appended to the programme of 1890; the report on history, the work of M. Lavisse,