therefore not surprising that one has arisen favourable to the education of farmers and tradesmen. The village school attended by the labourer's as well as the farmer's children may often be made to serve the purpose of an agricultural school. In towns and manufacturing districts, trade schools will have to be established. Nor will any one who knows how much painful instruction boys endure in the dead languages before they reach the age of fourteen or fifteen years, question that it would be an easier thing to give them a sound knowledge of the elements of chemistry as applied to manufacturing art and to agriculture, than to teach them to read Horace; and that it would be less laborious to imbue them with mechanics than with Greek. Between these two competing forms of instruction there is this difference, that the whole future life of the tradesman's, or the skilled workman's, or the farmer's son, will be an application of the one, but not of the other. Dr. Lyon Playfair, in his able lecture on industrial instruction on the continent, delivered at the Government School of Mines and of Science applied to the Arts, has borne testimony to the recent remarkable success of the trade schools in Prussia, in Saxony, in Austria, and in Denmark. Schools of arts and manufactures have been established with the like results in France. The success with which the principles of science in their application to practical questions are beginning to be cultivated in France, was made very apparent at the Great Exhibition; and it is but reasonable to expect, that the superiority which that country has confessedly attained in the products of art, by means of its schools of design, will eventually appear in other branches of manufacture, through its Ecoles des arts et manufactures. In adverting to this subject, I cannot but express a hope that your Lordships may be pleased to sanction grants in aid of the purchase of scientific apparatus of a popular kind for the use of elementary schools, the qualifications of the teachers to use such apparatus being first ascertained. I believe that the adoption of this measure would tend very greatly to diffuse a knowledge of science, not only in towns but in villages and agricultural districts. The use of the apparatus would not be limited to the children of the school. It would be applied, and permission should be given to that effect, for lectures to village audiences in the winter evenings, and for the instruction of evening classes. It would not only be used by the schoolmasters; the clergyman would take his part in the good work, and would often be aided by some of his parishioners; among the better educated and more intelligent of whom there often exists an earnest desire to contribute to the improvement of their humbler brethren. No expedient of secular instruction would probably be found, in practice, so effectual to elevate the character of the labouring man, as to teach him the knowledge of those great principles of scientific truth which admit of an application to his own calling. If put upon this path in his youth, he would be likely to follow it out; and becoming thus a reflective and a thoughtful man, elements would be collected out of which the Christian character might under more favourable circumstances be built up. The other duties which your Lordships have assigned to me, and which have left me during the last two years very little time for the inspection of elementary schools, will probably leave me none during the next. You have therefore authorized me to resign the inspection of the schools in Wilts into the hands of Mr. Warburton, to whose assistance I am already so largely indebted. I do this with great regret. It involves the sacrifice of the most agreeable part of my duties, the resignation of labours in which,-thanks to the sympathy and support I have experienced,—I have found no toil, and, of friendships which I have esteemed it an honor and a privilege to form. I believe that in no part of England are more judicious, earnest, and devoted friends of education to be found. It is a satisfaction to me to know that the inspection of their schools will be in the hands of an Inspector whom they so well know as Mr. Warburton, and whom they so highly and so justly value. To the Right Honorable I have the honor to be, &c. H. MOSELEY. The Lords of the Committee of Council on Education. WILTSHIRE AND BERKSHIRE. Tabulated Reports by Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools, Rev. H. Moseley, and Her Majesty's Assistant Inspector, Rev. W. P. War |