276 The Highest Education and its Difficulties . [May, 
with him from school, adds that “ our English Universities 
do not perform the function of a University, as that function 
is above laid down.” Professor Seeley, of Cambridge, 
writes: “ The present insignificance of our Universities in 
the work of science explains itself very naturally by the 
system pursued in them.” A Cambridge private tutor is 
quoted as saying, “ If so-and-so did not think so much he 
might do very well.” Thus we see that the “reform,” so 
far, is only in appearance. Oxford and Cambridge men as 
well as those who have studied at German Universities, 
men of science, men of letters, and men of the world, alike 
tell us that our system is fundamentally bad, and that it is 
exercising an injurious effeCt upon the whole of secondary 
education. 
As one of the causes of the disease, for it is nothing else, 
Prof. Bickerton justly, in our opinion, points out the undue 
cultivation of verbal memory which has so long ruled in the 
schools. “The successful schoolboy is often an unsuccess- 
ful man, because the glib word memory, that makes the 
thousand and one inflidtions of the Greek verb an easy task, 
is not the chief requisite in the more important problems of 
after life.” The author gives us from his own experience 
as science lecturer at Winchester College a very important 
observation which we do not recoiled! having met with 
before. “The junior classes exhibited distinctly more 
reasoning faculty than the elder ones. In many cases I 
have had the clearest evidence that mere memory work dis- 
tinctly reduced the capacity for consecutive reasoning.” 
Need we then wonder that so many boys who enter our 
public schools bright and intelligent come out as vapid 
dolts ? 
We must now turn for illustration of what has been said 
to the Oxford examination papers now before us, which, 
from many points of view, may prove instructive. 
We have already rehearsed the well known truth that the 
exclusive attention formerly given at the old English uni- 
versities to classics and mathematics no longer exists. The 
Natural Sciences are taught, and that by no means super- 
ficially. But are they taught fairly ? There are two 
fundamentally distinct ways of ascertaining the pro- 
ficiency and the capabilities of a student. We may either 
test to what extent he has succeeded in absorbing 
and assimilating the discoveries of others, or we may 
ask what are his powers of original research — of adding, 
in some department or other, to the sum total of exaCt, sys- 
tematised human knowledge. These two methods do not 
