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On Technical Education . 
287 
of thorough examination. Examiners are burdened with a 
mass of work which they cannot get through except in a 
perfunCtory manner, and which even then so utterly wearies 
them out that their faculty of judgment and comparison is lost, 
and, unless they are strongly belied, are far from preserving 
an uniform standard in their arbitrary and irrevocable deci- 
sions.” The late Prof. Augustus De Morgan held the opinion 
that he could judge of the merits of the competitor from the 
whole work, but that he could not reckon it tip in marks ; he 
therefore always refused to examine in that way. 
In addition to the Professional Examiners and the Assistant 
Examiners, there are two Official Examiners. What the 
duties of these examiners are does not appear ; they evi- 
dently do not prepare the questions, and it can scarcely be 
supposed they overhaul the marks the examiners have as- 
signed to the answers in the different papers, as they are 
apparently not of the same scientific standing as the Pro- 
fessional Examiners, and besides they can scarcely be consi- 
dered to be competent judges in all the different branches of 
Science which are examined upon. 
Written examinations fail utterly to test attainment in 
any of the Indudtive Sciences, as they would equally fail to 
test the artistic power of the painter or the sculptor ; and 
this is known to all who are practically conversant with any 
one of these sciences. I have never met a chemist yet who 
would engage a party as his Laboratory Assistant if his sole 
qualification for the post was that he had passed a written 
examination, however severe the examination might have 
been ; because the party requiring the Assistant would know 
that he could not, without practical instruction, turn any 
chemical information he might possess into practical power. 
What would be the value, for instance, of one learning, 
either from a book or a teacher, all the tests for arsenic ? 
If he could not actually put in practice that information it 
must simply hang like dust about the brain, or dry like rain 
drops off the stones. Does not such useless information 
represent the kind of information the majority of the stu- 
dents acquire, in the Department’s schools, of one or more 
of the InduCtive Sciences ; and from the miserable way the 
teachers are paid the evil is increased, as we have seen that 
some of them, in order to gain little more than a bare sub- 
sistence, have to teach some of those sciences of which they 
themselves have no practical knowledge. Then why is it 
that those in authority continue a system which can neither 
benefit the taught nor the State ? Mr. Herbert Spencer 
supplies, in his “ Sociology,” a general answer ; — “ It 
