critics, would then, working with all their time and energy, revise the course for the second year. And you would repeat the process for ten years. In the end at the cost of £100,000—really a quite trivial sum for the object in view—there would exist the scheme, the method, the primers and text-books, the School Dictionary, the examination syllabus, and all that is now needed for the proper teaching of English. You would have, moreover, in the copyrights of the course an asset that might go far to recoup those who financed the enterprise.
It is precisely this difficulty about text-books and a general scheme that is the real obstacle to any material improvement in our mathematical teaching. Professor Perry, in his opening address to the Engineering Section of the British Association at Belfast, expressed an opinion that the average boy of fifteen might be got to the infinitesimal calculus. As a matter of fact the average English boy of fifteen has only just looked at elementary algebra. But every one who knows anything of educational science knows, that by the simple expedient of throwing overboard all that non-educational, mind-sickening and complex rubbish about money and weights and measures, practice, interest, “rule of three,” and all the rest of the solemn clap-trap invented by the masters of the old Academy for Young Gentlemen to fool the foolish predecessors of those who clamour for commercial education to-day, and by setting aside the pretence in teaching geometry, that algebraic formulae and the decimal notation are not yet invented, little boys of nine may be got to apply quadratic equations to problems, plot endless problems upon squared paper, and master and apply the geometry covered by the earlier books of Euclid with the utmost ease. But to do this with a class of boys at present demands so much special thought, so much private planning, so much sheer toil on the part of the teacher, that it becomes practically impossible. The teacher must arrange the whole course himself, invent his examples, or hunt them laboriously through a dozen books; he must be not only teacher, but text-book. I know of no School Arithmetic which does not groan under a weight of sham practical work, and that