ADDRESS ON UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 143 



modifying the system of examination. In England, within 

 my recollection, it was the practise to require of the medical 

 student attendance on lectures upon the most diverse topics 

 during three years; so that it often happened that he would 

 have to listen, in the course of a day, to four or five lectures 

 upon totally different subjects, in addition to the hours 

 given to dissection and to hospital practice: and he was 

 required to keep all the knowledge he could pick up, in this 

 distracting fashion, at examination point, until, at the end 

 of three years, he was set down to a table and questioned 

 pell-mell upon all the different matters with which he had 

 been striving to make acquaintance. A worse system and 

 one more calculated to obstruct the acquisition of sound 

 knowledge and to give full play to the "crammer" and the 

 "grinder" could hardly have been devised by human 

 ingenuity. Of late years great reforms have taken place. 

 Examinations have been divided so as to diminish the num- 

 ber of subjects among which the attention has to be dis- 

 tributed. Practical examination has been largely intro- 

 duced; but there still remains, even under the present 

 system, too much of the old evil inseparable from the con- 

 temporaneous pursuit of a multiplicity of diverse studies. 



Proposals have recently been made to get rid of general 

 examinations altogether, to permit the student to be exam- 

 ined in each subject at the end of his attendance on the 

 class; and then, in case of the result being satisfactory, to 

 allow him to liave done with it; and I may say that this 

 method has been pursued for many years in the Royal 

 School of Mines in London, and has been found to work 

 very well. It allows the student to concentrate his mind 

 upon what he is about for the time being, and then to dis- 

 miss it. Those who are occupied in intellectual work, will, 

 I think, agree with me that it is important, not so much to 



