286 
On Technical Education . 
'May, 
students in the Indudtive Sciences. By not combining the 
two the examiner never comes in conta(5t with the teacher 
or the taught ; consequently the only test he has of the 
work and teaching of the schools are the written examina- 
tion papers. But by no written examination of any kind 
can it be ascertained whether the examinees have been 
trained and possess the mental qualifications necessary for 
being Good Observers and Experimenters, and whether 
they have even acquired the necessary manipulative skill for 
the latter ; and yet observation and experiment are the 
fountains, of the Indudtive Sciences,— they are the two 
sources from which springs our knowledge of Nature and 
its laws. As regards those of the examined who only go in 
for a mere written examination, all that the examiner knows 
about them is that they have or have not acquired the neces- 
sary amount of the names of things. 
There are four Permanent Inspectors for the Science and 
Art Classes, and about a hundred Engineer officers are em- 
ployed for occasional duty as Assistant Inspectors. Why 
military men should be singled out as a class to undertake 
the important duties of inspection would not be an unim- 
portant question for some Member of Parliament, zealous 
for the educational progress of the country, to ask the Vice- 
President of the Education Department. It would be inte- 
resting to know whether any reasonable explanation could 
be assigned for these peculiar appointments. That the duty 
is an important one must be admitted, for good inspection 
will reveal more as to the kind of instruction given in a 
school than the mere perusal of examination papers. The 
inspection, as will be shown further on, costs the country 
yearly a considerable sum of money. 
About twenty-five Professional Examiners are employed 
in the Science division ; they are supposed to — and probably 
do, although it has not always been the case — set the ques- 
tions, and they examine some of the papers ; the remainder 
of the papers are handed cn to a number of Assistant Exa- 
miners, who are or were paid so much per dozen papers they 
examined. This mode of payment for examining the papers 
must be a strong inducement to the examiner to get through 
them as quickly as possible ; and yet the teacher’s payment 
depends mainly, althotigh not entirely, as we have previously 
pointed out, on the numbers of marks the examiner assigns 
to his pupils. The Principal of King’s College, London, 
'the Rev. Canon Barry, well observes in his paper, “ The 
Good and Evil of Examination,” “ that there seems to be 
too little appreciation of the exceeding difficulty of the task 
