170 BERMUDA. 



two or three pages of their book, the answers were 

 very imperfectly given, if at all. 



The pupils are frequently placed in books too 

 difficult for them. A class may be in Carpenter's 

 spelling, as far as words of five or six syllables, with 

 theit meanings; but when tested by writing from 

 dictation or memory, they were found deficient in 

 spelling correctly very simple monosyllables. In 

 reading also, pupils had been frequently placed in 

 the Bible class, when just out of the primer; the 

 result was that they stammered and guessed at every 

 word; thereby, through their blunders, converting 

 the Holy Scriptures into nonsense, if not into some- 

 thing worse. The excuse in many schools was, that 

 they had no intermediate books between the primer 

 and the Bible, such as the second and third books 

 as issued by the Society for Promoting Christian 

 Knowledge; many of the children being orphans, 

 and the parents of others being too poor to purchase 

 them. 



I do not consider that religious instruction is 

 sufficiently attended to in the schools generally. I 

 fear that the pupils are more anxious to acquire the 

 knowledge of writing, grammar, geo^aphy, and 

 arithmetic, rather than to be able to recite correctly 

 and to understand thoroughly, scripture history and 



