420 
VISITS TO MADAGASCAR. 
CHAP. XV. 
to me or to others.” In consequence of these words the man 
was not put to death. 
Our conversation subsequently turned upon the enlighten¬ 
ment of the people, and I spoke of the high estimation in 
which education was held by all civilised nations; that even 
in England, notwithstanding all its attainments, there was 
no question on which men’s minds were at the present time 
more anxiously exercised than on the education of the people, 
to which all classes gave the greatest encouragement. The 
queen’s secretary fully confirmed my statements, and referred 
with evident satisfaction to the silver medal which he had 
before exhibited, and which his brother had received at one 
of the public examinations at the school in which he had 
been educated in England. We afterwards adverted to the 
possibility that the time might yet come when there should 
be not only schools to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, 
but a college at Antananarivo, where the youth of the higher 
classes and the most intelligent in the nation, should be more 
fully taught, and that the prince might perhaps preside at an 
annual examination, and distribute the prizes; while the 
princess, and the ladies her companions, might be spectators. 
The princess smiled with evident pleasure at this allusion. 
I added that, from many things I had witnessed, the intel¬ 
ligent youth of the nation appeared to me to be eager after 
knowledge; and amongst other illustrations, I mentioned that 
on my first arrival I had suspended a thermometer in my 
sitting-room, but that so many young chiefs had noticed it 
when they came, and not satisfied with being told that it 
exhibited the temperature of the atmosphere, asked so many 
questions about the properties of the mercury, the causes of 
the variations in the temperature of the atmosphere, and the 
manner in which one affected the other, that I began to fear 
I should be obliged to remove it for want of time to answer 
all the questions it suggested to their minds. This desire 
