Hi LIFE OF DR. ROLLESTON. 



instances in which a man whose talents and even genius had 

 been found by the world at large to be far superior not merely to 

 those of the average First Class-man, but to those of mankind 

 generally, has been placed in a Second or Third Class in an Oxford 

 Examination, and so far as such a verdict could go, stamped with 

 a badge of inferiority, or a false mint mark. Of course thereby 

 more or less injury was done to the man himself, and the public 

 were more or less deceived.' From Genoa, Jan. 13, 1881, he 

 writes to Professor Max Muller : — ' I have sent off an extract 

 from a memorandum of mine against our Examination system. 

 The more I think of it, the surer I am that with our system of 

 gambling and cramming for classes we shall never succeed in 

 making the pursuit of knowledge a real end in the University. 

 The largest fact I know about it is that the Scotch Universities 

 Commission, with our plan of a trifld or tetrafid Class List before 

 them, deliberately recommend that there should be only two 

 divisions allowed, viz. Class-men and Pass-men. I wish you 

 would think of it, and if you agree with the view that a multi- 

 plicity of Classes I, II, III, and IV intensifies the gambling 

 element, and also produces more cases of injustice and injury 

 than the other plan of one Honour Class and one Pass, do 

 ventilate the plan.' Then follow names of men whose later 

 careers had conspicuously reversed the verdict of the Examiners, 

 including (what is not to be found in the more public Me- 

 morandum) a little list of First Class-men whom the world has 

 not thought much of afterwards. How charged Rolleston's 

 mind was with this subject is seen by his. following this letter 

 by another, written within a month, from Bordighiera : — ' I hear 

 that the University Commission is likely to ask for another year 

 wherein to finish their work, and I suppose therefore, though 

 I am not very sanguine, that we have some more hope of getting 

 them on to lines with a somewhat broader gauge than they are 

 upon at present. The reform of all others which is the most 

 important is the reform of the Examination system. It really 

 rules everything almost which Oxford has in the way of activity ; 

 by virtue of its gambling element it possesses an attractiveness 



