5 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



programme shows that the instruction of these 6,360 recitation 

 hours are distributed as follows : Mother-tongue, 1,000 ; modern 

 languages, 1,160; history, 360; geography, 280; mathematics, 

 1,080 ; science studies, 960 ; drawing, 960 ; penmanship, 160 ; book- 

 keeping, 80 ; morals, 40 ; legislation, 80 ; political economy, 40 ; 

 philosophy, 160. The ages of the pupils average eleven years in 

 the first and sixteen in the last class. The recitation hours of 

 a pupil passing through the last two grades of the grammar 

 school, and the four years' course of the English High School in 

 Boston are, barring certain changes on account of options, as fol- 

 low : Mother-tongue, l,illi ; modern languages, 494 ; history, 

 570 ; geography, 152 ; mathematics, 722 ; drawing, 760 ; book-keep- 

 ing, 95. 



Here, again, as in the case of the French classical lyce*e course, 

 the instruction in the mother-tongue is found to be less than in 

 the American representative school. The hours devoted to mod- 

 ern languages (1,160) are, in fact, somewhat in excess of those 

 given to French (1,000), and, it may be added, are in most marked 

 contrast to the time allotted to the same study in the Boston 

 High-School programme (494), even after the latter has received 

 a credit under this head for a certain number of hours that in 

 point of fact are used by many pupils for Latin. 



Mathematics, which, as has been seen, plays but a subsidiary 

 role in the classical lycee course, in the secondary special course 

 assumes more prominence comparatively, the average being 4£ 

 hours against 3-J- hours' recitation per week in the typical Ameri- 

 can programme. Yet even here it is not up to what may be 

 termed the United States standard. A tabulated exhibit of the 

 hours of the classical courses of the two countries shows that an 

 average of only one hour and fifty minutes per week is given to 

 mathematics in the classical lyce'e course, compared with an aver- 

 age of three hours and forty minutes in the Boston classical school 

 course. A comparison of that course with the French secondary 

 special programme develops also the fact that a typical American 

 classical school not only devotes more hours to mathematics than 

 the French consider essential for a preparatory scientific course, 

 but also exhibits the further surprising fact that the Boston Eng- 

 lish High-School course, with two years of grammar-grade school 

 prefixed to it, actually gives less time to mathematics than is de- 

 voted to that study in the six years' course proper of the Latin 

 School. And this is not by any means peculiar to the Boston 

 school courses. The programmes of other schools exhibit a treat- 

 ment of the mathematical subjects quite similar. At Phillips 

 Exeter precisely the same number of hours is given to mathemat- 

 ics in the classical and scientific courses. At Williston, even 

 after adding the course in surveying to the mathematics, the per- 



