644 Cram and its Amenities. [November, 
was the case with Darwin : he was able to pursue his 
inquiries calmly and dispassionately, — able always to take 
two or three years if his task could not be finished in one, 
and in no fear of any unpleasant consequences if some idea 
which he had taken up should lead to nothing. 
But if we say to a man, to a youth, or worse still to a 
child, “ You must by a given date reach a certain standard 
of knowledge, a certain grade of culture, to be judged of in 
a very summary way, or in default you shall be cut off from 
the means of earning a livelihood,” we place him in the very 
conditions wherein study becomes unsanitary, even ruinous, 
and that the more decidedly the more immature the brain. 
Yet so long as our national system (?) of education is 
allowed to turn upon preparing for and “ passing ” examina- 
tions, children at our elementary schools, youths seeking 
admission into the Civil Service, and young men qualifying 
themselves for the professions, are kept in peril of having 
their intellects permanently stunted and enfeebled, and their 
general health injured. At the risk of digressing from my 
more immediate subject I will here say that the true method 
for testing the proficiency of a student should be not 
catastrophic, but, like the great processes of Nature, conti- 
nuous, “ stetig .” 
To return : these evil consequences of hurried, forced 
work, under the spur of anxiety, are not mere suppositions 
as to what may be ; they are, and have been, actually ob- 
served. We may take first the case of children in our 
primary schools. Mr. Colt-Williams, in his Official Report 
to the Committee of Council on Education, on the schools 
which he had examined last year in the counties of Radnor 
and Hereford, calls especial attention to the overworking of 
the young pupils, and says, with an especial reference to the 
proposed extension of the curriculum : — 
“ All this extra work means extra hours of study with less 
play, and children do not get too much play now. When 
one thinks of children of tender years coming in all weathers 
one and a half or two miles to school to be there by nine in 
the morning ; school till twelve ; play and dinner — and how 
scanty that dinner often is — till two p.m. ; school again till 
four or 4.30 p.m., and then the walk home, in winter often 
in the dark, home lessons to prepare for next morning, and 
this for five days in the week for more than nine months in 
the year ; can more be added ? And yet this is the daily 
routine of schools in my district, though we have no singing 
by note, very little poetry, — that only in Standards 4, 5, 
and 6,— and no Science. Time will show whether soundness 
