MASON COLLEGE, BIRMINGHAM. 
7 
cannot be relied upon to be self-supporting. This committee will 
likewise select the course of lectures to be delivered, and by diligent 
canvassing will endeavour to provide such an audience as shall 
minimise, if not obviate, loss. The fee charged to the students 
will vary entirely with the circumstances of the locality. For the 
afternoon lectures, for example, a very common fee is lialf-a-guinea 
for a course of twelve; for evening courses it varies down to as 
low as one shilling where the lectures are financed by a municipality. 
Sometimes the same course of lectures (with modifications) is 
delivered in the afternoon to a middle class audience, and in the 
evening to one mainly of artizans, the University or College fee for 
such a double course being a fee-and-a-lialf. # 
This, then, is a brief outline of the College University Extension 
Lecture Scheme as it exists on paper, and, to some extent, in work. 
The progress and development will no doubt be slow; for we can 
provide the water for the horses, but the drinking must await their 
own good pleasure. Still there ought to be a wide field open to us, 
especially in the long series of important towns which are dotted 
over the Black Country. It must not be imagined that the whole 
of the courses of lectures have reference to subjects of culture pure 
and simple, for many have a close technical bearing, and some are 
wholly technical. But I hope that in time it may be more fully 
recognised that the principles of a technical subject form not only 
a matter worthy of being handled by one accustomed to university 
methods of thought, but that such a one is more likely to handle it 
with freedom and attractiveness, and to awaken a living interest in 
the minds of his hearers. Even in strictly technical schools it 
would be an excellent thing to supplement the regular teaching by 
occasional courses conducted on lines in which the teacher is 
fettered only by his own conception of how best he can do the work 
he has planned out for himself, and without any regard to the 
stereotyped and rigidly defined syllabus of that bugbear of the 
earnest educationist, the Science and Art Department of South 
Kensington. 
* Further information and detailed schedules of courses offered under 
tlie two schemes can be obtained on application to the Secretary, Prof. 
Hillhouse, Mason College, Birmingham. 
January, 1893. 
