TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 469 



2. Report of the Anthropometric Committee. — See Reports, p. 175. 



3. Apprenticeship Schools in France. 

 By Professor Silvanus P. Thompson, B.A., D.Sc, 8fc. 



The system of apprenticeship, as it has existed in England and on the Con- 

 tinent, is falling into decay from social causes, which render the education of the 

 apprentice at the hands of his master impracticable. The question of apprentice- 

 ship is one of the knotty points of technical education, and involves the following 

 problem : — How to give to artizan children (in the skilled industries) that technical 

 training and scientific knowledge which their occupation demands, without detain- 

 ing them so long at their schooling as to give them a distaste for manual labour. 



Four distinct solutions of this problem are possible : — 



1st. Send the children to work in the factory or workshop before their primary 

 education is completed, making it obligatory all through their apprenticeship that 

 they shall have every day a certain number of hours' schooling in a school in the 

 workshop, or attached to it. 



2nd. Keep the children at school as long as their education is unfinished, but 

 set up a xcorhshop in the school, where they shall pass a certain amount of time 

 every day, so as to gain at least an aptitude for manual labour. 



3rd. Organize a school and a workshop side by side, and co-ordinate the hours 

 given to study with an equal number of hours devoted to systematic manual labour. 



4th. Send the children half the day to the existing schools, and the other half 

 to work half-time in the workshop or factory. 



Illustrations of all these systems are to be found in Paris. 



Of the first type there are no fewer than 237 in France, of which the schools of 

 M. Lemaire and of MM. Ohaix (in Paris) may be taken as excellent examples. 



Of the second type of apprenticeship school is the Ecole Oommunale d'Ap- 

 prentis, in the Rue Tournefort, Paris. This is an ordinary elementary school, 

 having workshops attached to it, and used for about three hours a day by the lads. 



The third type,^ which is par excellence the apprenticeship school, is well 

 illustrated by the Ecole Municipale d'Apprentis of the Boulevard de La Villette, 

 Paris, and by the Ecoles d'Horologerie of Besancon and of Cluses. Statistical 

 tables were given of the attendance at these schools, of the education given, of the 

 capital and current expenditure per pupil, and of the results attained. 



Fourth type. — Half-time schools are rare, and not very important in their 

 results. 



The author conceives that there is room for schools of all these different types 

 to exist side by side in all large manufacturing centres, though schools of the first 

 and third types are probably best suited to the conditions of British industry. 



The author claims to have established, by facts drawn from the experience of 

 the French schools, — 



1st. That the systematic instruction of apprentices in the skilled industries is 

 possible. 



2nd. That it can be effected in several different ways. 



3rd. That apprenticeship schools of one or other type afford a most satisfactory 

 and economically sound way of attaining this result. 



4th. That this New Apprenticeship solves the knotty problem of technical 

 education which arose out of the decay of the Old Apprenticeship. 



4. On Credit as an Asset of a State. By Hyde Clarke, V.P.S.S. 



The purpose of the author was to show, in illustration of his previous paper, 

 '' On the Loans of Sovereign States,' that independently of all material natural 

 resources and of capital, a State may possess credit, which will supply capital, and 

 is to be reckoned as an asset. Taking a colony as an example, he pointed out that the 

 natural resources, land, pasturage, harbours, water-power, rivers, forests, mines, 



