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and head and tail pieces, by the engravers, the Brothers Dalzell, who appear also to have printed the volume. It is a charming specimen of typography.

Another volume, of greater pretensions, and involving greater difficulties in the production of it than the one last mentioned, is "A Chronicle of England, B. c. 55—a. d. 1485. Written and illustrated by James Doyle." It is a quarto volume of nearly five hundred pages, beautifully printed from modernised founts of the revived old-faced type, and embellished with eighty-one cuts, printed with the text throughout the volume. The artist being the author of the work, he has so arranged his literary matter as to place each illustration in the centre of a page. The mode of printing the work appears to have been this: the pages to contain the cuts, and those at the back of them, have been left out in the progress of the work, and the remainder of the volume printed without them. They have then been so arranged as to be printed by themselves, four or eight pages at once, and the embellishments on one side only of the sheet. On the completion of the entire work the respective pages are collated, the illustrated parts introduced in their proper places, and the volume bound by a method adapted to books of prints or works of single leaves. The author states that in the Illustrations his object "has been rather to express with clearness the action of the various scenes described than to give a series of attractive pictures"; and that "whatever might contribute to the truthfulness of the representations,costume, architecture, local scenery, and other accessories, and even personal portraiture, so far as authorities existed,-has been carefully studied." The chronicle appears to have been undertaken during the author's youth, with a view to pictorial illustration, but having attracted attention as it approached to completion, and been honoured with approval and commendation by his Royal Highness the late Prince Consort, the author

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undertook not only to revise, but to rewrite the text, with a view to its publication. "With the d works," the author remarks, "an artist is seldom q even when he is himself the manipulator. But the greater difficulty of the engraver in this case culty of copying by block printing the tints drawings, the author feels bound to acknowledge the creditable manner in which Mr. Evans has pe part of the task." The work could not indeed produced without the aid of modern improveme machinery and materials employed, and the com artist and typographer in the same individual. I a to the publishers of this work, Messrs. Longm for the loose specimens now submitted.

The subject of Picture Printing by Chromo-li which has of late years made rapid advances towa tion, is reserved for a second Paper.

SEVENTH ORDINARY MEETIN

ROYAL INSTITUTION, January 23rd, 1865,

J. A. PICTON, F.S.A., Esq., PRESIDENT, in the

Several new members having been admitted, the announced that Mr. MOORE, curator of the Muse prevented by indisposition from being present, but had been making experiments with the ova of salmon; succeeded in hatching the ova, and the developmen fry was now taking place very satisfactorily. The ova inspected microscopically by any gentleman interested subject, by applying at the Museum, William Brown

The following paper was then read:6

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CLASSICAL STUDIES:

THEIR TRUE POSITION AND VALUE IN EDUCATION.

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BY THE REV. JOSHUA JONES, M.A.,

HEAD MASTER OF THE LIVERPOOL INSTITUTE.

No educational question has been more keenly debated than that of the position which the Classics ought to occupy in our scholastic curriculum. By some it has been held that they should be the exclusive, or almost the exclusive, instruments of intellectual education; while others have entertained the opinion that they should have no place among the ordinary subjects of study. Between these two extreme opinions lie others, modified in various degrees according to the points of view, intellectual tastes, and varying circumstances of the condition of life, or state of mind and feeling, of those who have held them. From the time of Locke until the present day this question has formed a battleground upon which rival educational factions have fought, both eager for the strife, and, as is generally the case in all controversies, too often heedless of the cause of truth, and caring for little else except victory over their opponents.

It may seem to some a superfluous task to attempt to say anything further upon a subject about which so much has already been said, and consequently to advance anything new is so difficult. It appears to us, however, that it has been too generally treated in the one-sided spirit of the advocate

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or the partisan, and that writers have hitherto part written upon it exclusively from the or view which they may have happened to adopt. purpose of this paper rather to take a review of question in all its aspects, to consider the argu compare what has been said on both sides, to m tions and qualify assertions; and though we can bring forward, in a matter which has been so keenly discussed, much that is altogether novel, hope to be able to present the whole subject in a and to shed a somewhat clearer light upon it. W that the subject is particularly pressed upon our a the present time by the circumstance that Her Public School Commissioners have, in their repor published, recommended that the Classics shoul retained as the leading subject of instruction and t tional basis in the Public Schools of England; therefore just now an interesting and useful m inquiry whether this recommendation, after a due c tion of the facts of the case, and of the arguments con., be a wise and judicious one or not.

It is not difficult to account for the high positio the Classics have so long occupied in our system of ed At the revival of learning in the sixteenth century t no literature worthy of the name, except that of Gre Rome. The middle ages had produced a few great int but they had expended their energies for the most theological, or philosophical, subtleties, calculated in exercise and develop the logical powers of the mind little value, either in themselves or for the purpose of intellectual discipline. There had been a conflict b human reason and ecclesiastical authority; the latt fixed certain limits beyond which intellectual inquiry

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not go; and the former, active and struggling, but yet constrained by outward force to obey, had expended its energies on every minute point within the narrow sphere assigned to it. The mind of man has perhaps but rarely manifested such intense power and acuteness as it exhibited in the works of some of the great schoolmen, e. g., Anselm and Thomas Aquinas; and but rarely, perhaps, has it ever produced results of so little value to the intellectual progress of mankind. Scholasticism, then, having supplied no general literature, the classical writers of Greece and Rome were the only authors suitable for general study, when the human mind began to emancipate itself from the fetters in which it had been so long bound. Again, Latin was at the time, and had been for centuries, the language of the Church, and of the schools of law and physic; so far from being a dead language, it was the vernacular of the churchman and of the learned; and it had thus established a sway from which it could not easily be displaced. It must also be remembered that at the period spoken of, and for some time after, classical subjects would have formed natural and interesting materials of thought and conversation to the educated, from the entire absence of those numerous and absorbing topics which the vast increase of knowledge, and the wide-spread diffusion of information, scientific, literary, political, and general, and the brilliant and extensive literature of modern times, supply to us in our age. Then further, it must be borne in mind that contemporaneous with the revival of learning was the foundation in our own country of many of the great seminaries of learning, which naturally adopted the classical languages and literatures as the then only general subjects of study worthy of pursuit. Thus it happened that the Classics got exclusive possession of the educational field; they formed the only unprofessional studies of the great seats of learning; they became the sole media through which professional instruction

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