Obituary Notices, 
483 
1911-12.] 
main burden of devising the new regulations and of piloting them 
into harbour after the leading principles had been decided on. How 
much strenuous effort this cost, only those who were in intimate touch 
with him at the time can ever know. In his Promoter’s Address of 1908 he 
thus referred to the impending changes in words in which those nearest to 
him were concerned to detect a premonitory note of weariness : — 
“ I am keenly interested in the developments that lie before us ; but I 
must confess that I shrink from the labour that they will involve. Yet 
the whole of my career has been a turmoil of University reform, beginning 
at Cambridge ; and it may as well end as it began, if it be decreed that it 
is to continue any longer.” 
It was natural, and indeed inevitable, that Professor Chrystal, who 
had so great a share in the remodelling of the curricula of the Universities 
of Scotland, should be called upon to take part in the inception and 
execution of the further reforms in the primary and secondary schools 
of Scotland which had been rendered necessary by this radical change. 
In obedience to this call he took a leading part in the business of framing 
a new system for the training of teachers. When the first Edinburgh Pro- 
vincial Committee charged with the administration of this system entered 
upon its duties, he joined it as a representative of the University and was 
elected chairman. Dr George Macdonald, the Assistant Secretary to the 
Scotch Education Department, has allowed us to transcribe the following 
appreciation of Professor Chrystal’s public services in this connection : — 
“ The immediate tasks that confronted the Committee were three in 
number. In the first place, the Department’s new Regulations for the 
Training of Teachers — a code that involved a veritable revolution in the 
educational System of the country — were submitted to them in draft for 
consideration and discussion. Many of the problems were new to Chrystal, 
who had never taken any active part in primary school administration. 
But he mastered the whole subject in an astonishingly brief space of time, 
and made himself the guiding spirit in the Committee’s deliberations — 
deliberations which resulted in certain important modifications being 
made. 
“ In the second place, negotiations of an exceedingly delicate character 
had almost at once to be entered upon with representatives of the two 
great Presbyterian Churches as well as with certain prominent members of 
the Episcopalian community, the object in view being to arrange for the 
transference of the existing Training Colleges to the new Committee. 
These negotiations were of a very protracted and difficult kind, and it 
was largely due to Chrystal’s tact and fairmindedness, and to his success 
