250 ADDRESS ON UNIVERSITY EDUCATION ix 



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 number of 

 subjects among which the attention has to be dis- 

 tributed. Practical examination has been largely 

 introduced ; but there still remains, even under the 

 present system, too much of the old evil insepara- 

 ble from the contemporaneous 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 examined 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 have 

 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 



