If the sketch be for the inspection of others, who are to compare it with the lesson as it is given, I would give the following directions for its preparation:

1. Write legibly and plainly the title of the lesson, the class for which intended, the average age and time in school of the children.

2. Map out a definite plan, that your lesson may be systematic; one distinct, definite thought or point to keep you steady to one line. Thus, in a religious lesson, one particular truth or one special Christian duty; in an object-lesson, one aim, to call out the powers of observation; in a lesson on arithmetic, one definite rule or portion of rule; in a lesson on natural history, to show the wisdom and goodness displayed in the structure of the animal, bird, etc., under notice, and so to impress a lesson of love and thankfulness to God, the Divine Creator; in a geographical lesson, one or two points-say, in one lesson, the main physical features of a country; in another, the political, etc. It will be well to mark at the top of the sketch the particular point you wish to make clear.

3. Then show the working out of this point, remembering that thirty minutes is quite enough for any collective lesson. Lecture lessons of an hour's length are not needed, or at all desirable. You want to take one portion of work, and impress that thoroughly, and then something definite is gained. "This class comes before me knowing so and so, I want them to leave me knowing so and so;" and remember that you are preparing the lesson for children, and must put into it only what they may fairly be expected to understand in the time, not what you yourself, a grown-up person, could digest.

4. Then the main divisions of the lesson may be put down, marked in Roman, and the subdivisions in Arabic, figures. Your object is to show how you arrange your information, the raw material, as it were, of the lesson, and mould and fashion it so as to make it suitable to children's minds and comprehensions. For in choosing matter for a lesson, it is as important to know what to reject as what to choose; and much that would be exceedingly valuable for the teacher to master, would be quite unsuitable to give his children. I would advise each teacher to keep a notebook, in which this matter shall be entered, that it may not be wasted. It is surprising how much knowledge may be gained by this method in the course of a year.

lesson;

5. Your sketch, then, will contain the substance of your neither put into too detailed a form, nor jotted down too barely and meagrely, like a table of contents or heading of a chapter. The general style of it should be pithy, pointed, and condensed, that its different parts may catch the eye. Where you will use questions, the answers to which will serve as connecting links, and bring out the different parts of the lesson, you may indicate in the sketch; in fact, anything may be put into it which will make it complete as a skeleton or abstract of the lesson.

This being done, look over your lesson carefully, (a.) Whether the matter is good in itself.

and see

(b.) Whether it is well arranged and carefully developed; the different parts well balanced, due attention being given to each.

(c.) Whether it is thoroughly illustrated and simplified; remembering that over-illustration weakens and confuses, rather than clears and elucidates.

(d.) Whether it will come within proper limits.

(e.) Whether there is really some useful practical good to be gained from it, so that the children will be usefully employed in receiving it. These points being satisfied, it is ready to be given; the delivery of the lesson would require a separate notice.

ALBERT C. DAYMOND.

IX. THE SCOTTISH UNIVERSITIES' COMMISSION. THE Royal Commission intrusted with the carrying out of LordAdvocate Inglis's Universities' Act of 1858 will terminate the first period of its existence about the time that we issue our present number. The Statute certainly provides for its continuance during another year. It is very questionable, however, whether this extension will be adopted. No hint has been made public of its having been either sought or granted, while the Ordinances issued in the end of November seem to indicate, by their number and their elaborateness, that the Commissioners have given the coup de grâce to their work, if not to their office. Should the Commission suddenly cease now, it will be by the exercise of a somewhat remarkable forbearance. Men who have it in their option to hold such powers for another year are not always so self-denying as to forego the privilege. It will also be regarded as "clean from the purpose of the things themselves" by the academic public, whom the removal of the fostering tutelage of the Commissioners will probably take somewhat by surprise. It may be that some

of the Commissioners themselves feel that their labours have continued quite long enough. One or two of them, it is whispered, have grown tired of the affair, or find, at any rate, that things can be managed quite as well without as with their bodily presence. How far this has been the case we have unfortunately no means at present of ascertaining. During the first year of the Commission the published Ordinances bore the names of those Commissioners who were present when each of them was passed. Since March 1860, however, this wholesome practice has been discontinued, and the Ordinances have borne simply the name of the permanent chairman, who seems to have been bent upon holding the rudder with his own firm hand from the harbour to the haven.

Whether the Commission is to avail itself of this year's grace or not, the present break seems to be a fitting occasion for glancing at its past labours, for ascertaining what it has done, what it has not done, and what may still be effected, for the improvement of the Scottish Universities.

Of this Commission, and the amount of good its labours might confer upon Scottish learning and education, the highest expectations were formed. The Act in which a twenty years' agitation had issued was regarded less as a consummation in itself, than as the carte blanche with which the Commissioners could enter the academic domain, there to carry out, with no other let or hindrance than their own judgment might impose, the long-expected reforms. Never did Royal Commission start upon a better field, or enter upon its labours with more favourable opportunities for rendering a national service. It was, indeed, less a Commission of Inquiry than an Executive with unusually ample powers, to which the nominal supervision of the Privy-Council gave dignity, without adding any restraint. That all this was felt and appreciated by the Commissioners themselves, is evident from the very promising list of queries which they made it their first business to address to academic bodies and literary men. These queries seemed to indicate that the Commission had been considering, and was prepared to deal with the chief moot points of University Reform,-Examinations, Graduation, re-arrangement of Faculties, and new Chairs. The hopes, however, which this early promise raised have been long ago sadly blasted. The Commission has doubtless inaugurated some improvements; there are some slight grounds of satisfaction in the results of their labours; but regarded as a whole, in the light of our need and of their powers, these results are deplorably insignificant. On comparing the Universities as they are now with what they were three years ago, we confess to an inability to discover any remarkable differences. And on comparing the small differences that we do see with the magnificent enumeration of "Powers of Commissioners," in the eleven sub-divisions of the fifteenth section of the Act, the amazing contrast would only be ludicrous if it were not so discreditable and disheartening. If the parturient mountain has not brought forth a learned mouse, there has at least been much ado about very little. And we question whether, when their Blue Book and their account are rendered to Parliament, the game will be found to have been worth the candle it has consumed.

During the two and a half years of the continuance of the Commission, no fewer than twenty-four separate Ordinances have been issued. Of these, six refer to Aberdeen, five each to Edinburgh and St. Andrews, four to Glasgow, and four are general, or refer to all the Universities alike. According to another classification we find that eight Ordinances are devoted to the bringing of the Statute into force, and to questions connected with University meetings and elections; five relate to medical graduation, three to graduation in arts; four refer to the emoluments of professors, and one to their retirement; the remaining three are purely special, having reference to bursaries in St. Andrews, to a scholarship in Edinburgh, and a new law chair in Glasgow.

In enumerating the improvements which these ordinances have carried out, we give precedence to the union of the Colleges in Aberdeen, a step not more required by the peculiar circumstances of the case than it is justifiable on the principles alike of economics and of academic polity. One large and well-equipped educational institution

(be it college or primary school) is, in every view of it, better than two small ones. It is by no means essential, however, to the idea of one college that it should have no more than one Professor for each subject. The beau idéal of a University is that in which every division of a subject that is wide enough to occupy the talents and the time of a suitable teacher, should be assigned to a separate Professor. We have very close approximations to this perfection in the German Universities. The Commission, it seems to us, had a glorious opportunity of adopting this principle to a limited extent in Aberdeen; and it would have needed but a small addition to the "compensation they have granted to the discarded Professors, to secure them as supplementary duplicate Professors, and so to have made Aberdeen the best equipped of the Scottish Universities.

The next improvement with which we have to credit the Commission is the addition of three Chairs to the staff of the University of Glasgow. This unusual liberality, however, has not cost much. One of the chairs, that of Biblical Criticism, is to be endowed from the funds of the Deanery of the Chapel Royal, an arrangement which keeps the chair in abeyance till some of these funds are at Her Majesty's disposal. The second chair, that of English Literature, which was required to meet the Ordinance of the Commissioners on Arts' graduation, is the only one that is to be charged upon the Parliamentary vote, and that only to the extent of £200 a year. The third chair, that of Conveyancing, is the gift of the Faculty of Procurators in Glasgow, which the Commissioners had only gracefully to accept. In Edinburgh, the old chair of Public Law has been revived, and endowed with £250 of salary. There is also now great likelihood of a chair of Sanscrit being established in the metropolitan University, endowed partly by the liberality of a distinguished Sanscrit scholar, and partly by Government. No other University has received any addition to the number of its chairs; and when we add that these new Professorships will not cost the country much above £600 a year, it will be sufficiently evident that the increase has been most economically effected.

The last-issued Ordinances are likely to be the most interesting to the present occupants of University chairs. They should be so, also, to all friends of the Scottish Universities. For though the advancement of learning is by no means necessarily proportionate to the funds at its disposal, learning can never be expected to make much progress, or to draw men of ambition and talent into its ranks, so long as it is impoverished. The new Parliamentary vote granted, under the Commission, for Principals, Professors, and Assistants, amounts to £6827, 18s. 10d. per annum, or nearly as much as the former vote. Of this sum, Edinburgh receives £3305, 17s. 10d., Glasgow £1325, Aberdeen £1255, St. Andrews £944, 1s. In the gross, this no doubt seems a very respectable sum; but when we compare it with the number of Professors amongst whom it is divided, the average increase will be found to be miserably small. The Professors, however, generally speaking, are the greatest, almost the only, gainers by the Com

mission; and we would not grudge them one shilling that they receive, had other interests, equally important to the elevation of Scottish education, been treated with like consideration. We must add, however, that the principles on which this new grant is distributed are in many cases somewhat incomprehensible. Take, for example, two chairs in the University of Edinburgh, which are certainly not without some relation to each other-those of Agriculture and Chemistry. In the latter chair the estimated fees are £1110; yet it is thought necessary to add to this magnificent income a new Parliamentary vote of £200 per annum-total, £1310. In the chair of Agriculture, the estimated fees amount to £100 a year; the old endowment from University funds is £50-total, £150; and to this not one penny is added by the Commissioners. On what principle is this distinction made? If the latter chair is worth retaining at all, it evidently stands more in need of Endowment than any other chair in the University. Do the Commissioners expect a man of talent or position to hold that chair for £150 a year? Surely not. Do they, then, wish to ruin the chair of Agriculture? If so, it would have been more honest, more creditable, for them to have exercised their "powers," and to have abolished the chair by ordinance, instead of resorting to the expedient of starvation. Who are the guardians of Scottish Agriculture? Will not the Highland Society, or their excellent Secretary, move a finger on behalf of the doomed high-priest of Ceres?

Even a more clamant case, however, is that of the Principalship of St. Mary's College, St. Andrews, an office of no mean importance, either to "religion or learning," and at present filled by a most estimable and accomplished man. The Principalships of Edinburgh and Glasgow have been made worth £700 a year each; that of Aberdeen £600; that of St. Salvator and St. Leonard's (St. Andrews) £550. The Principal of St. Mary's alone has, as yet, received no addition from the Commissioners; and the increase announced in one of their lately-published ordinances is only prospective, depending on a contingency which it is not in man's hand to control. Now the peculiar hardship of Principal Tulloch's case lies in this, that he is the only Principal of a Scottish College who performs active duties as a teacher, the office of Primarius Professor of Divinity being connected with the Principalship. He is both a Professor and a Principal, yet his remuneration is quite inadequate for one of these functions. In comparing his office and salary with those of the Principal of the neighbouring College, we must not be understood as complaining that the latter has no active teaching, or has too much money. Our complaint is, not that Principal Forbes has much, but that Principal Tulloch has little. Nor can the plea be raised that Principal Tulloch is primarily a Divinity Professor merely, and that his Principalship is now an empty honour. He is, in reality, at this moment, and has been since the removal of Sir D. Brewster to Edinburgh, the Senior Principal of St. Andrews. As such, he takes precedence of every other University official in University meetings; he superintends the routine business of the University; he is the representative of the University in its corporate