1 8 79-] England , France , and Germany . 793 
supplied nearly a hundred able workmen to the firm itself, 
and the few who have left have found exceptionally good 
situations. The apprentice is bound for four years, the em- 
ployers guaranteeing him a place when he is out of his time. 
They are divided into two classes, compositors and printers. 
Close to the composing- and press-rooms there is a school- 
room, where the apprentices of both classes spend a couple 
of hours daily, either in improving their knowledge of the 
three R’s or in going through a technical course of typo- 
graphy, including grammar, writing and composition, reading 
and correcting proofs, the study of the different kinds of 
type, and so on. They are also taught to read and set up in 
type Greek and Latin, without any attempt to instruct them 
grammatically in these languages ; and they are taught the 
rudiments of English and German. Lastly, there is a 
course on such subjects as the history of typography, or 
mechanics, physics, and chemistry, as far as they apply to 
printing machinery and processes. During the three years 
the apprentice compositors receive from 5 d. to 2s t per day, 
and the printer apprentices from J^d. to 3s. 8d. At the end 
of the term most of the apprentices prefer to remain in the 
employment of the firm, and can then earn from 3s. to 6s., 
according to their ability. Great pains are taken to system- 
atise the teaching. The compositor apprentices are set to 
work under the direction of a foreman whose chief business 
is to instruct them, and not to work for his own or his em- 
ployer’s benefit : he is, in faCt, a professor of printing, just 
as Professor Thompson is a professor of Physics. 
MM. Chaix’s establishment, it must be understood, is only 
one of over two hundred similar schools in different parts of 
France, in which a similar system of instruction is given in 
the manufacture of optical instruments, shirts, jewellery, 
paper, Italian paste, ribbons, calicoes, plate glass, silks, 
bookbinding, and a dozen other branches of trade. 
A great impetus has been given to this kind of apprentice- 
ship schools by the passage of a law, in 1874, forbidding the 
industrial employment of children under 12, except they 
receive two hours schooling per day ; nor may children over 
12 and under 15 be employed for more than six hours per 
day, unless they have finished their elementary education, 
their employers being made personally responsible for carry- 
ing out these regulations. 
In the school of M. Soufflot, a jeweller, the character of 
the instruction is purely technical. The success which has 
attended the “school on the workshop system,” as Professor 
Thompson aptly calls it, must not only be extremely grati- 
vol. ix. (n.s.) 3 E 
