REPORTS come from medical inspectors of elementary schools of the depressing results of their work. In case after case they can do no more than point out that treatment is urgent. They have no power to see that treatment is given. THE Association of Assistant Mistresses in Wales has issued a memorandum claiming a minimum salary of £120, rising to £220, and pointing out that, as things are, the Welsh schools afford a training ground from which the English schools profit. WE notice that recently three more Education Authorities have decided that married women are not eligible for posts in elementary schools, and that marriage during tenure of office is equivalent to resignation. THE medical examination of candidates for junior scholarships in London resulted in 1,015 being d-clared fit and 790 unfit. Out of the whole total examined last year for various scholarships given by the London County Council, 1,227 (out of 2,848) were declared physically unfit. Many of these, however, were accepted after medical treatment. THE Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress will be received by Mr. Runciman on the second of this month in or ter that they may urge the immediate abolition of fees in secondary schools and technical colleges. thus providing for free education from the primary school to the University. MRS. BURNS, M B., until recently medical officer of Wycombe Abbey School, has been appointed medical officer under the Durham County Council. OVER 15,000 candidates were entered for the Cambridge Local Examinations in December last. THE Fabian Education Group will hold two open meetings during the month in Clifford's Inn Hall at 8 p.m. On the 3rd inst. Dr. Hayward will deliver a lecture on " The Educational Fallacies of G. B.S." On the 23rd inst. Mr. R. Bray will lecture on "Curricula and Staff.” COLONIAL AND FOREIGN NOTES. How the Universities are fed. GERMANY. In order to understand the contemporary history of education in Germany-and it is important for us to understand it-we must bear in mind that, whilst the three orders of higher schools (Gymnasium, Realgymnasium, and Oberrealschule) have, for the most part, equal rights, it is still from the Gymnasium that the Universities draw by far the largest proportion of their students. On the other hand, the technical and commercial Hochschulen are supported mainly by the modern school (Oberrealschu e). Premising that theology is still reserved for the pupils of the Gymnasium, we give the figures that show how the Prussian Universities are fed : Girls' Schools. wrote last autumn, is not remaining a mere project; steps are being taken to realize it. To this end money has been voted by Parliament. The Education Authority of Berlin has decided to raise all its seven girls' schools to "higher girls' schools" in the sense of the scheme, and from October I they will have ten classes. By April 1, 1910, there will be grafted on to a school (not yet specified, both a Women's School (Frauenschule) and a Training College (Seminar). The provision of these institutions, it will be remembered, must precede the establishment of Studienanstalten, paces of study for the University. On to one of the higner schools will be grafted an Oberrealschule (April 1, 1911); on to another, a Gymnasium April 1, 1912). By this last date, then, Berlin will have completed the machinery contemplated. Prot. Rein, in an address to the Reichs und Bezirkslehrerverein at Gotha, has expressed approval of the reform, with its admission of women to their share in the work nati nal culture and in the making of history. The speaker added that schoolmistresses could be the true teachers of the young only when they had become mothers, or at least wives; accordingly, it must be made possible for them to marry and yet to stay in office; only then would there be a guarantee of a true understanding of child life; he himself would glad y serve under a head mistress who had maternity as her supreme qualification for office. An Extension of Medical Inspection. About Bad Books. Chemnitz, in the Kingdom of Saxony, has put a crown on its system of medical inspection. Henceforth all the children in its primary schools will receive advice fron the medical officers as to the choice of a vocation. In the middle of the last school year they will be specially examined and warned, in case of need, against particular callings. Those, for example, whose lungs are affected or who show otherwise a tendency to tuberculosis will be recommended to av id the trades that induce a development of tuberculosis. It is a plan for saving health and lite which should be imitated in every school, and a notable incident in the great modern war upon disease. Germany is waging also another war. It is against Schundlitera'ur, the printed rubbish by which boys are injuriously affected. At Hamburg, the Gesellschaft der Freunde des vaterländischen Schul- und Erziehungswesens has issued a pamphlet to warn parents of the dangers that ari-e from the reading of Buffalo Bill and Nick Carter stories. Of this 120,000 copies have already been put in circulation. An ingenious device is employed to draw children from bad to good books. A whole class is set to read some chosen work simultaneously, either at home or in the school; and the discussion of it awakens lively interest. The Town Council of Leipzig, at the instance of the local Sittlichkeitsverein, has forbidden twelve stories of the Nick Carter class to be sold at the public kiosks, and has imposed restriction, on the display of pernicious "literature" in shop windows. But it is not easy to determine what reading should be allowed and what prohibited. Stories of adventure are not necessarily corrupting; the sternest of moralists would hardly tear "Treasure Island" from the hands of his son. We should all condemn books in which vice is exalted, especially if it be exalted in imperfect English. Towards piracy, however, some of us woul I show a little indulgence, even if those who "go on the account" do not end in Execution Dock. If we no longer worship our ancestors, we should at least respect them; and we must remember that the Germans who dispossessed the Kelts in Britain were pirates. Nay, had we to name the six greatest Englishmen that have ever lived, we could hardly leave out Drake, whose energy, skill, and courage were exhibited in piratical enterprises. Moreover, piracy is not seductive, because it is no longer a practical vocation. But, on the whole, the Germans are right; the books that our children read should be carefully watched. Again and again has the source of youthful aberrations been found in the disturbing influence of Schundliteratur. Medical Education. Medical societies are unanimous, says the introduction to the new decree, in holding that the future doctor of medicine must have a strong i tellectual and literary training; in other words, professional must be based on liberal education. Accordingly the diploma of bachelier de l'enseignement secondaire is required from every candidate for the degree of doctor of medicine. The qualifying studies are to last for five years, exclusive of the preparatory year devoted to physics and chemistry. Henceforth it will be difficult for any one to write himself doctor before he is twenty-six years old. There is to be opened in the name of each student a livret scolaire, a record of his industry and success throughout his preparation; examiners will have this to guide them, as well as the hazardous results of a brief questioning. Instruction is of three forms : (i.) theoretical instruction, presenting the full sum of knowledge necessary for the doctor of medicine; (ii.) technical instruction given in laboratories and co-ordinated with the theoretical instruction; (iii.) clinical instruction in the hospitals. The distribution of these forms of instruction is to be regulated by means of programs drawn up annually. With the matter of the teaching we will not trouble our readers beyond reporting that more importance is to be attached to studies and practical work in radiology. It is improvements in the methods of study that have interest for us. Hitherto the preparation of the doctor has been too bookish; greater weight will now be allowed to the true methods of science, which rests not on authority, but on observation and an ever-widening range of experience. In an ideal medical school, we are told, the hospital should be the centre of instruction; observation in the hospital is the most important factor in the making of the doctor of medicine. We urge once more that these methods of science demand a greater place in general as well as in professional education, they being as serviceable for the fashioning of our minds as for the healing of our bodies. The Teaching of French. But should science thrust literature aside? We at least think not, seeking for it parity of right and not supremacy. Here we must remark on a difference between French and English schools. In the latter, we fear, science often goes short; France sees already a danger that it will injure literature. There is general complaining of a weakness in French, in the knowledge of the history of literature, in the literary sense, in the power of expression; and it is Section D, the "side (as we should say) of the lycée on which sciences and modern languages form the staple matters of instruction, that reveals this weakness most plainly. In Section A the study of Greek and Latin, in Sections B and C that of Latin, serves as complementary to the study of French; a chorus of Sophocles or a speech of Cicero quickens a taste for beauty, form, and harmony which communicates its effects to the native tongue. In Section D the teaching of modern languages by the direct method is insufficient for literary purposes. The pupils of D show a marked inferiority to their comrades in French; they are embarrassed and awkward in expressing a thought; they often transgress the rules of syntax, and they are even ignorant of the orthography of common words. As remedies for these defects M. Barot proposes in the Revue Universitaire three devices: (1) for all sections more hours of French; (2) for D in all lycées separate French classes; (3) in the baccalauréat rejection of candidates who fail to get a specified number of marks (say 10 out of 40) in French. The Ministry has taken the question up, and has decided to have it studied by the InspectorsGeneral. Joined with them, at their request, will be some professors of grammar and letters, and the inspectors of the order of letters in the Académie de Paris. The labours of the Commission so formed will have as an issue the publication of special Ministerial instructions upon the teaching of French. The Anti-Clerical Church and School, The Bill to which we have referred is frankly an act of warfare. It is aimed at the bishops and clergy, and punishes every manifestation publicly made in a church against the school. In the case of such an offence there will be applied Article 35 of the loi de séparation, under which the penalty is one of imprisonment for from three months to two years. That is for the clergy; parents attacking the school get off with a fine of from 11 to 15 francs, or, for a second offence, with five days in gaol. The quarrel is none of ours, and interests us only in its effects upon the history of culture. Alas for the blindness of the clergy! There is ever a craven fear among them that schools will empty churches, and few have the courage to say: "The children shall have their schools, the best that the age can supply, schools with the methods of science and with the humanizing influences of literature; we will leave the result to high heaven.' Their timidity estranges many educated laymen from the Church. Let us keep in mind what has happened in France with regard, for example, to the higher education of women. The clergy opposed it strongly. Now the women have not forgotten who they were that fought to stay the irresistible chariot of progress. DENT'S SCIENTIFIC PRIMERS Edited by Dr. J. REYNOLDS GREEN, Sc.D., F.R.S. With numerous illustrations, price 1s. net each volume. This new series of Primers will be useful for all readers who desire a simple and general, but accurate, knowledge of scientific subjects, and will afford adequate assistance to students who have not been able to make a special study of science at all or whose knowledge may extend to one or two branches only. Now that science has become very homogeneous, much work on the border lines of the different branches has united them in a more intimate manner than was formerly the case, so that their interdependence is becoming every day more evident. It is impossible now to be a biologist without possessing some acquaintance with physics and chemistry: biology itself includes both botany and zoology; physiology deals with the vital phenomena which are common to both plants and animals, while geology is based on physics, chemistry and astronomy. Biology regarded from another point of view leads directly on to anthropology and ethnology, and may be held to culminate in sociology. In issuing this new series of Primers the Editor and Publishers hope to follow out this line of thought, full details of which scheme are included in the prospectus of the series, to be had post free of the Publishers. The Publishers are prepared to consider applications for Specimen Copies with a view to introduction. London: J. M. DENT & CO., Bedford Street, Strand, W.C. SOUNDS OF ENGLISH. WRITING OF ENGLISH. By PHILIP J. HARTOG, with the assistance of Mrs. A. H. LANGDON. Second TROIS SEMAINES EN FRANCE. An Illustrated Reader on the Direct Method, with Questions for Conversation and Grammatical Exercises. By D. L. SAVORY and L. CHOUVILLE. Second Edition. 25. LA LÉGENDE DES SIÈCLES, By HUGO. (Oxford Higher French Series.) Edited by G. F. BRIDGE. 35. net. NEW GERMAN READER (DEUTSCHES An Illustrated Reader on the Direct Method, with Questions for Conversation, SCHOOL HISTORY OF OXFORDSHIRE. THE OXFORD GEOGRAPHIES. PRACTICAL GEOGRAPHY.-Part I. By J. F. UNSTEAD. With 27 Illustrations. Is. 6d. In preparation, Part II, 1s. 6d. The two Parts will be issued bound together, 2s. 6d. ERASMUS: SELECTIONS. Edited by P. S. ALLEN. Illustrated. With Vocabulary. 3s. 6d. and (India By W. E. PATERSON. With Answers, 38. Part II (304 pages) Set of Four Charts, on Calico and on Top-lath,, 10/6 Chart I.-The Age of Feudalism (1066-1272). II. The Growth of Parliament (1272-1485). In the various Charts a Series of Horizontal Bands are allotted to Rulers, Prominent Men, Constitutional History, Notable Events, Growth of Parliament, Discoveries and Colonization, Treaties, Wars, Literature, &c. The Charts represent graphically Historical Facts and correlate the chief Historical events with Geographical Incidents, Growth of Empire, and the growth and importance of Literature. E. J. ARNOLD & SON, Limited, 18mo, cloth elegant, gilt top, pp. 104, price 2s. ENODIA. A VOLUME OF POEMS AND FABLES. "Perhaps the most characteristic piece in this anonymous collection is the three pages of eloquent apostrophe addressed 'to a rabbit as seen emerging into sunlight out of the earth.' The rabbit is a little overwhelmed with words; but the verse is of good quality—a quality which is maintained throughout the book-and the poem illustrates the merit of the writer in its power of reflecting on and finding an interest in common things."-The Times. "Has a charm and individuality which defy analysis."— The Journal of Education. LONDON: WILLIAM RICE, 3 Broadway, Ludgate Hill, E.C. probably of thirty teachers. The wording of the rule is that "persons will be retired at the end of the school year during which they reach seventy." It is also provided that no teacher more than forty years old shall be taken into the service of the School Board. President Students of education have suffered President Stanley Hall for many years, and they have not suffered him gladly. At last America herself has turned, and has uttered Stanley Hall. the groan which courtesy has obliged foreigners to suppress. That highly respectable journal, the School Review, gives the place of honour in its January number to an article headed "Hippias Paidagogos," in which the weaknesses of the President are exposed with refreshing frankness. We quote, as a sample of the whole, the writer's judgment on his style: "In spite of President Hall's breezy panegyric of slang and his denunciation of linguistic manicuring' I must begin by saying that his style is deplorable. Its energy and vivacity are incommunicable gifts of temperament. Its vice is precisely that to which clever American youth is already too pronea straining for emphasis, picturesqueness, and point at any cost of impropriety of phrase, grotesque metaphor, false antithesis, or abuse of irrelevant scientific technicalities. Of what avail is it for the tutor in English to rise up early and take rest late in the endeavour to purge sophomoric rhetoric and eradicate the freshman's natural taste for bathos if the President of the University lets himself go in this fashion: If not a polyphrastic philosophy seeking to dignify the occupation of the workshop by a pretentious Volapük of reasons and abstract theories, we have here the pregnant suggestion of a psychological quarry of motives and spirit opened and ready to be worked'? Imagine President Eliot proposing a true scale of standardized culture values for efferent processes.' Or conceive of an eminent French writer saying that crime is cryptogamous,' or talking about rudimentary organs of the soul cropping out in menacing forms or being developed so that we should be immune to them on the principle of the Aristotelian kκáðapσis.” Suggestions are being made for a reform in the teaching of physics. We publish the second and third paragraphs of a of Physics. valuable expression of opinion on the subject:"2. The teacher should put out of his mind the thought that each pupil before him is aiming to become a specialist in physical science, or that the study of physics is his main interest in life. Instead of following the logical order of topics as this would present itself to an expert physicist, he should follow the psychological order as this reveals itself in the natural working of an intelligent and curious mind of secondary-school age. 3. Physical science should not The Teaching be presented as something fixed and definite, whose conclusions are final, but rather as a division of organized knowledge which is constantly expanding and developing, and which has frequently, within historic times, corrected its conclusions in the light of later discoveries. To this end some outline of the history of physical science and of the time and order in which its fundamental laws were discovered and developed should be given to the student. Wherever it is possible to relate the discovery of new applications of a physical principle to man's other activities, this should be done, in order that the student may be made to feel from the beginning the intimate relation between the laws and phenomena with which physics deals and other human interests. In other words, the teaching of physics should be humanized." Another paragraph deprecates undue stress upon accuracy of measurement in elementary work. The N.E.A. The executive committee of the National Education Association announces that the next annual meeting will be at Denver, Colorado, July 5 to 9, in the present year. We feel sure that some English schoolmen will find their way thither, distance being to them nought when educational stimulus is to be got. CAPE COLONY. It seems as if Cape Colony were overcoming one of its great difficul- The Gazette reports also that seven cases have recently arrived from Messrs. METHUEN'S NEW BOOKS SATISFYING THE LATEST REGULATIONS and APPROVED BY EDUCATIONAL AUTHORITIES. EXAMPLES IN ELEMENTARY MECHAN ICS, Practical, Graphical, and Theoretical. By W. J. DOBBS, M.A. With 52 Diagrams. Crown 8vo, 5s. AN ORGANIC CHEMISTRY for Schools and Technical Institutes. By A. E. DUNSTAN, B.Sc. (Lond.), F.C.S. With many Illustrations. Crown 8vo, 2s. 6d. OUTLINES OF PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY. FIRST YEAR PHYSICS. By C. E. JACKSON, M.A. A PRELIMINARY GEOMETRY for Be- From A.D. 476 to 1878. Edited by A. H. JOHNSON, M.A. By METHUEN'S SIMPLIFIED GERMAN TEXTS A SHORT HISTORY OF GREECE. WALTER S. HETT, B.A. With 3 Maps and 4 Plans. Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. For Students reading for the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate and similar Examinations. ELEMENTARY LATIN: Being a First Year's A SCHOOL LATIN GRAMMAR. By H. G. 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