174 
JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
properly dealing with the Universities would be satisfactory which 
did not in the first place restore the colleges to the position which 
they were designed to occupy by their founders. A considerable 
portion, at any rate, of the revenues of the colleges should be 
devoted to the purpose for which they were bequeathed. In esti- 
mating the amount which might, under a more judicious system, 
be made available for the higher education of the masses, they 
must not forget the college livings. The incomes of these amounted 
to a quarter of a million a year. He agreed with many of the 
younger Pellows at Oxford and Cambridge that it would be greatly 
for the benefit of the Universities if the advowsons of these livings 
were disposed of If such a course were adopted, putting the value 
of the advowsons at the low rate of ten years' purchase, there 
would be two and a half millions, or about £100,000 a year added 
to the instruction and maintenance or partial maintenance fund. 
The endowments of England ought to be used to facilitate the 
progress of a clever and industrions lad from the primary school to 
a secondary school, and thence to the University. 
PLATO'S THEOEY OF EDUCATION. 
ABSTRACT OF PAPER BY MR. W. MORRISON, M.P. 
(Read February 1st, 1872.) 
The lecturer began by pointing out that Plato was, as far as we 
know, the first person who ever promulgated a complete system 
of education, and that every one who has followed him has bor- 
rowed from him, with or without acknowledgment. After tracing 
the points in which Athens and Great Britain present a parallel in 
the existence of high education and wealth by the side of great 
poverty, in their position as great mercantile and naval powers, 
and in the circumstances under which their colonial empires grew 
up, and in certain points of national character, the paper described 
Plato's scheme of universal compulsory State education, extending 
from the cradle to mature life, applicable to both sexes, and con- 
sisting of music and gymnastic, in the full Greek sense of the 
words, in mathematics, and culminating in the case of the favoured 
few in dialectic, the final objects sought being to penetrate to a con- 
ception of the true nature of God, to obtain a perfect government, 
