branches which it is worth the while of the public to foster by money payments, because they are not so obviously useful as to foster themselves, he had much better devote himself as soon as possible to professional and money-making studies, to which the application of any large amount of endowment would be highly improper.

We ought never to lose sight, in arranging our educational institutions, either of the man who aspires only to the highest general cultivation of his age, or of the man who desires to be a specialist-to carry knowledge further. Both are to be encouraged to the utmost: the first by providing him with the very best teaching, by enabling him to test his measure of success, and by sending him forth with the stamp of public recognition; the other by ample pecuniary rewards given as much as possible, but by no means always, in return for definite work done.

Those who say that universities are to be mere places of education -upper schools, in fact and those who say that they are to be mere machines for research and retreats for learned leisure, are equally wrong. A great university like Oxford should aim at being at once the best place of education, the greatest machine for research, and the most delicious retreat for learned leisure in the whole world. Her advantages in the struggle for the Primato in all these ways are absolutely overwhelming. If she is not all that before the century is done, it is only because she wills to be false to herself. But we must keep wide apart these two questions: "What should the university be ready to teach ?" and "What should the ordinary English gentleman learn during that period of his general education which closes with the university?"

I have still to reply to two opposite kinds of objection.

It will be remarked by some that my list is pretty long, and that it would be impossible to attain by one or two and twenty any great skill in the arts, or wide knowledge of most of the subjects, included in it. I am quite aware of this, but I ask for nothing of the kind. I ask for a wide knowledge of only one subject-Geography in the sense of Earth Knowledge and History. A very moderate amount of knowledge of the others, thoroughly accurate so far as it goes, is all I dream of; and it must be recollected that I would allow no subject to be commenced as a part of general education, the study of which might not with great advantage be continued through the whole of life. Some subjects would, of course, be pursued in after life by one, some by another; but the kind of general education which approves itself to my mind would at least oblige those who passed through it to have looked at all the great divisions of human knowledge, and to have satisfied themselves whether they had or had not a turn for them.

The line which bounds general education is, after all, only an imaginary one. General education should only end with life; but

men who are to be busy with the world's work, and to give a due place to the second of the objects of life which I set out by enumerating, will, after one or two and twenty, begin to find the time they can give in the course of the day to general education much shorter than it used to be. Still, so great are the facilities which our modern life affords, that those who are now just beginning their general education with the prospect of having all the chances may well hope, if they live out their years and retain their energies, not only to know all the most important facts which man has found out about himself and the universe of which he forms part, but to have seen, heard, and read before they die all that is best and most beautiful in that portion of the universe which serves as man's habitation. In order to do this they must from the very first be carefully prevented wasting their time on second or third rate things. The real use of teachers, properly so called, after the very first youth has been passed, would be chiefly to keep us within the limits of the really valuable and excellent. Not the least desirable professor in any university would be he who would tell us faithfully and wisely what famous books we had better leave on the bookshelves, what famous places we need not visit, what famous theories are cinders, ashes, dust. I am not aware, however, that the appointment of so useful a person falls within even the very extensive powers which are to be acquired by the University Commissioners under the Act of this year. We must be content to make many mistakes; but if there once arises amongst men and women of the world a real demand for the help necessary to such an educational course for their children as I have sketched, there will be found persons to supply the want.

And is it possible that such a demand should not arise? Into what company of people who know the world does one enter without hearing lamentations over the miserable results of our present schools? their wonderful powers of boobyising the inferior, their scant success in making much of the superior boy?

Another set of critics will take exception to my proposals upon. quite different grounds. They will ask that many more and severer studies should be made a part of general education, and they will point with admiration to Mr. Mill's address at St. Andrews. I decline the contest with a giant. I have no doubt that the methods. proposed by him are excellent for the purpose of making men of science and great thinkers. My object, however, is far more humble. I am writing in the interest of those who wish to learn from the seminal minds of the age, not to rival them. I am thinking not of the education suitable for a hundred or two of picked intelligences, but for many thousand very good sort of young men with fair brains and fair powers of application, but by no means Admirable Crichtons. I appeal for support not to the great philosophers and educationists of the day, but to cultivated men and

women, persons of ordinary common sense, who know something of the world of affairs, something of the world of books, and something of society. I ask them whether the kind of youth I propose to turn out at one or two and twenty would not have had a pleasanter boyhood than the successful products of the existing system-would not be more likely to be useful to his fellow-creatures, and to develop his own faculties to the utmost?

Many of us who were not, alas! so old then as we are now, fondly imagined, when the Palmerston Government appointed the Commission to inquire into the nine great schools in 1861, that when we ourselves had children fit to go to those schools, they would be able to obtain a really good education there. Now, however, in 1877, although doubtless many improvements have been made, it would be mere flattery to say that anything which deserves to be called a good education for the ordinary purposes of a man of the world is to be obtained at any one of them. The schools throw the blame on the universities, and the universities on the schools; I throw the blame on no one-I merely register an unpleasant state of facts. I do not even say that a good education may not be obtained at our great schools for some purposes or other. I only venture to affirm that, for any purposes with which I am acquainted, the education is a very miserable one; and that I see its bad effects in the world of English politics at every turn. Let those who are satisfied with it by all means retain their happy contentment; but many people whom I meet are not satisfied, and perhaps some of the foregoing remarks may be of aid or comfort to a few of them.

Train the Admirable Crichtons as you please, they cannot be spoiled irretrievably. Sooner or later they will fight their way to the front; but the sensible cleverish boys who might have made valuable men are turned into Barbarians or Philistines by the dozen, and that at a cost to their parents, between seven and twenty-one, of from two thousand five hundred to four thousand pounds.

M. E. GRANT DUFF.

SEA OR MOUNTAIN?

"Peu de maladies guérissent dans les circonstances et les lieux où elles naïssent et qui les ont faites. Elles tiennent à certaines habitudes que ces lieux perpétuent et rendent invincibles. Nulle réforme (physique ou morale) pour qui reste obstinément dans son péché originel."-MICHELET.,

THE present is not an unfitting season to call attention to the results of recent investigations as to the relative influence and value of sea and mountain climates as remedial and invigorating agencies. The restorative properties of sea air have long been fully appreciated, although regular and periodical migration to the seashore is a custom of modern origin. The popularity of mountain health-resorts is, however, of quite recent date, and much has still to be learnt from careful observation and experiment as to the exact nature of the influences at work in them, and the precise limits of their appli

cation.

This is not a question of narrow professional import, but it is one of those practical physiological studies upon which educated persons may desire, and may be expected, to form just and correct ideas. It is, I believe, a somewhat prevalent notion that sea and mountain air are widely different in their mode of action; that they are, as it were, the extremes of climatic influences. This, however, is not the case. There is much that is common to both of them in their action on the human organism.

The results, indeed, of precise experimental observations on this subject are perhaps a little at variance with what we might, at first sight, have been led to anticipate. An attempt to determine experimentally the difference in the action of sea and mountain air was made by Professor Beneke, of Marburg, in 1872.1 He had already

established, by observation and experiment, that exposure to the air of the North Sea (his observations were made in the Isle of Norderney) produced an appreciable acceleration of the nutritive changes in the nitrogen-containing tissues of the human body. In more simple language, it helped us to "throw off the old man," to get rid of our old material, and to put new stuff in its place. By what precise means it led to so desirable a result he had not been able to satisfy himself. Was it the abundance of ozone in the air? Was it due to the influence of the strong reflection of light from the sca ? Or was it simply a stimulating psychical effect? The phenomena observed were not sufficiently accounted for by either or all of these suggested influences. It occurred to him that he might (1) "Deutsches Archiv für Klinische Medicin." March, 1874.

establish some basis for a satisfactory explanation of these results, if he could ascertain the relative proportion in which bodily heat was lost, in a given time, in sea air and in inland air. Experiments on the human organism itself were of little avail for exact observations, since they must inevitably be complicated by the heat-regulating processes within it. He therefore constructed the following simple apparatus, by which the loss of heat from a heated body, under various external conditions, could be observed:

A thermometer was suspended in a glass flask, into which water at a temperature of 50 degrees Centigrade was introduced, and then it was ascertained how long, under various external conditions, it took for the water to cool from 45 to 35 degrees. The influence of clothing in interfering with the loss of heat was also tested by enveloping the flask, first with shirting, then with linen and flannel, and finally with shirting and a double layer of flannel. The observations with this apparatus were made, first in a closed room in the Island of Norderney, then outside the house in the midst of the village, and then on the shore of the island; and these were compared with like observations in a closed room in Marburg, and on a terrace in the professor's garden there. All these observations gave the same result, viz. that in equal or even higher temperatures of the air, the flowing-off of heat occurred much more rapidly on the seashore than inland; a circumstance which Professor Beneke refers, first, to the high degree of saturation of sea air by moisture, and secondly, to the intensity of the currents of air on the seashore. And he infers that the beneficial influence of the North Sea air on the human organism is due, in great part, to the increased loss of heat it occasions from the surface of the body. In answer to the objection that the same effect would be produced by a cold bath or by exposure to air of a low temperature anywhere, he rightly replies that the peculiar effect of the sea air is, that it withdraws heat in a more gradual and continuous manner, that its currents greatly stimulate the surface, and thus a steady restoration of the heat lost is produced without causing any great tax on the reactionary forces of the body, so that weakly persons may be exposed with perfect safety, for hours together, to this cooling, and, at the same time, reconstituting process.

The next point the Professor desired to ascertain was, how the loss of heat from the apparatus described above would be affected by exposure to mountain air at different altitudes, and accordingly he made a series of observations at the following places:-On the Schienige Platte, near Interlaken, 5,800 feet above the sea, the temperature of the air ranging from 9.5 to 13 degrees Réaumur; it took 91.5 minutes to produce the same loss of temperature which was brought about in 53 minutes, temperature of air 13 degrees