nearly ready for the high-school, had been settling into a condition of despair over this particular study. Meanwhile the boy's use of the English language had been, under the influence of the public school, steadily deteriorating. After rummaging a big text-book for more than an hour the father succeeded in discovering among the socalled "exceptions" what he considered the probably correct answers to most of the questions composing the lesson of the following day. These questions were afterward taken to a distinguished scholar, a student and teacher of language and philology. He could not answer them in any terms which would have satisfied the teacher of the boy or the author of the text-book on Grammar. They were then shown to the very highest authority on such subjects to be found in this country, to a gentleman whose attainments in the science of language are celebrated by the world of scholars. His answer to these questions was a strain of unmixed invective against teacher, text-book, and school-system which could tolerate such wasteful folly in instruction.
But such waste is by no means confined to the primary stage of education. Some years ago a professor of Greek in an Eastern institution visited the recitation-room of a Western college, where a class of sophomores were reading a play of Aristophanes. Only one of the class—and this
