school. For the first year the teaching may be viva voce, with easy problems and abundant experiment; care being taken that each week's lectures shall be reproduced on paper, and great attention being paid to correct drawing. In the second year the teaching will be more minute and more extended, and a good book will be mastered. At the end of this time the class is fit to pass creditably the Oxford Local Examination for juniors, and has done with mechanics for the present. The third and fourth years will be given to inorganic chemistry. The third year will include only lectures in the class room; a text-book being used, experiments being shawn by the master, but no laboratory work being done by the boys. The fourth year's work will be conducted entirely in the laboratory, each boy manipulating with his own instruments at his own table. At the expiration of these two years the class will be qualified for the chemistry examination in the London University Matriculation. The fifth year is given to botany. If a good book is used, if each boy works for himself with lens and knife, if Henslaw's Schedules, or a modification of them, are regularly filled up; above all, if plates are not made to do the work of living plants, the pupils will at the year's end thoroughly understand the principles of classification, will know the characteristics of at least all the British orders, and will be able with the help of Bentham or Babington to make out almost any English flower. The boys who have completed this course will be from 16 to 17 years old. Some of them will now be leaving school; those who remain will give the rest of their time to physiology. They will begin with human and will pass to comparative physiology, using in the first Professor Huxley's valuable little book; dependent for the second, of which no school manual exists, on the skill and method of their teacher. But whether at the earlier or the later age, they will pass out into the world immeasurably superior to their contemporaries who know not science, with doors of knowledge opened which can never again be closed; with a fund of resource established which can never be exhausted; with minds in which are cultivated, as nothing else can cultivate them, the priceless habits of observation, of reasoning on external phenomena, of classification, arrangement, method, judgment.
The subject of books and apparatus, involving as it does the question of expense, is of the highest practical importance. Apparatus need not cost much; but it may, and if possible it should, cost a great deal. While poor and struggling schouls may begin cheaply and proceed gradually, institutions which can spend money on racket courts and gymnasiums ought not to grudge it on museums and botanic gardens. We have taught mechanics efficiently, that is to say, we have passed our classes for the last three years in the Oxford Local, with a good air-pump, a set of pulleys, models of the force-pump and the common pump, with Keith Johnston's scientific maps, and with the diligent use during the second year of Newth's "Natural Philosophy." But we have lost no opportunity of making the boys acquainted with machinery; from the crane and the water-mill of our daily walks, to the steam engine and the spinning jenny of the manufactory; for he who has not examined engines at work will never understand them clearly, or describe them correctly, For teaching chemistry, a laboratory is absolutely essential. No matter how rough or shabby a room, so that it be well ventilated, have gas and water laid on, and will hold from sixteen to twenty boys. I hold in my hand the model of a cheap laboratory table, on the scale of two inches to a foot. It is about nine feet by three, and contains eight compartments, each two feet by sixteen inches, with two slight shelves, and a special recess for the teacher. It costs about 4l. If made for twice the number of bays, it may be made at about nine shillings per boy. The general laboratory stock, including a still, a stove or furnace, gas jars, a pneumatic trough, a proper stock of retorts, crucibles, tubing, &c., and the necessary chemicals will cost under 12l. Each pair of pupils must have also between them a set of test tubes, a washbottle, a spirit lamp, a waste basin beneath their table, and twenty-four bottles of test solutions, while each bey has his awn blowpipe, tripod and stand, pestle and mortar, and three beakers. These will cost each boy about eight shillings. He will replace everything that he breaks, and will receive the value of his stock from his successor when he quits the class. The text-book used should be Roscoe's, or Williamson's, and a large black board is quite indispensable. In botany the book for the boys' use is Professor Oliver's Lessons; but the teacher will find great advantage from Le Maout's "Leçons de Botanie." An excellent modification of Henslow's Schedule is published by Professor Mabington for the use of his Cambridge classes, and Lindley's "Descriptive botany," price one shilling, is a most useful help. Every boy should be furnished with a small deal board, a lens, and a sharp knife. The botanical micrescope which I exhibit, including a lens fixed or movable, a black glass stage, two dissecting needles and a forceps, is made by Mr. Highley, of Green-street, Leicester-square. If they are ordered by the dozen he will furnish them at six shillings each. Flower trays, such as I hold in my hand, should be kept constantly in use; the boys being encouraged to bring in wild flowers, and to place them in their appropriate niches. Their cost per tray, holding eighteen bottles, is under two shillings. Fitch's diagrams designed for the Committee of Council on Education, which cost 2l. 9s. the set, are a valuable help to the lectures; and for schools which have large purses or liberal friends, Dr. Auzoux's Models of Plants and Plant Organs, ranging in price from 20 to 100 francs, and ten times the size of life, form a luxuriant assistance to beginners, which only those can appreciate who have worn out their eyesight and their temper over a composite floret or the glume of a small grass. The same excellent modellist, whose catalogue is on the table, provides every organ necessary for the study of comparative and human physiology; and his prices ought not to be beyond the reach of any prosperous school. In any case a skeleton will be necessary, and will cost about £5; and if the Committee of Council were to authorise the reproduction of such typical physiological cases as, from the skilful hands of Mr. Charles Robertson of the Oxford Museum, drew so many admirers in the Exhibition of 1862, these would find immediate purchasers in many of our schools. At present teachers want the skill or the leisure to make their own preparations, and they cannot buy them. A good set of meteorological instruments costs from £16 to £20, but these, with astronomical apparatus, are a costly luxury, and may be left out of the list of indispensable necessities. I cannot think that any school, professing to teach science systematically, will be long satisfied without a typical museum. As scientific work proceeds, specimens of all kinds, some purchased for lecture work, others given by friends or collected by the boys, will gather and increase, till the class-roam cupboards and shelves are choked, and a special room must be devoted to them. Here will be arranged, in one place rocks and fossils, in another trays of minerals, in a third zoological specimens, in a fourth physiological preparations. The driest corner in the room will be assigned to the Herbarium, a small library of scientific reference will vive promise of the future. Everything not typical will be rigorously excluded; every case will be so carefully arranged and so plainly labelled as to tell the history of its contents to the eye of the least instructed observer. And it will be hard if some corner of the playground cannot be laid out as a botanic garden. In the crowded school premises which we are happily leaving I hare found room for nearly four hundred plants, and at the new school to which we are about to migrate, I shall riot in two acres of garden ground, with a pond for water plants and a sheltered rockery for ferns.
It remains only to examine the mode of obtaining teaching power; a point which presses heavily on many
