II. The second grade of instruction is represented by 16 gymnasiums, or classical schools, with 105 professors and 2,094 students, and 129 Hellenic high schools with 6,643 pupils, under 256 teachers—an aggregate of 8,737 pupils and 361 teachers. To this grade of schools should be added 93 private schools, some of which are of a superior order, and most of them compare favorably with the public high schools and impart instruction to 5,252 pupils, more than half of whom are girls.

III. The elementary schools, viz., 877 for boys, and 134 for girls, under 1,074 teachers, educate 54,406 pupils. These 1,011 common schools are distributed through all the nomarchics (counties) and islands.

TABLE.-Elementary and Secondary Public Schools in 1868.

16 105 2,094 119 256 6,643 877 917 45,094 134 157 9,312

Besides the regular elementary schools there are three orphan asylums with 158 pupils (80 girls and 70 boys).

IV. Under the head of Special Instruction may be mentioned—

Five Theological Seminaries, viz., one at Athens, recently endowed by the brothers Rizaris; one at Tripolis, one at Chalcis, one in Syra, and one at Corfu; the one at Athens is of a higher order.

Five Nautical Schools established in 1867, viz., one in Syra, one in Hydra, one in Spetses, one in Galaxidi, and one in Cephalonia. The pupils who pass a successful examination receive a diploma to serve in the merchant service.

One School of Art, and fourteen Drawing Schools.

One School of Agriculture.

One Military and Civil Polytechnic Academy.

One Teachers' Seminary with a model school attached.

V. The government appropriates liberally to the department of education, the expenditures for 1868 amounting to 1,653,446 drachmas ($300,000).

PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS.

The following statistics illustrate the further operations of the law of 1857. They can not be compared closely with those of any former year, in as much as under the law of 1857 a different classification of schools prevailed. Many of the higher primary schools were ranked with the secondary schools, and the evening and adult schools were brought into a class by themselves.

TABLE I.-General view of Elementary Schools in 1865.

411

ICELAND.

ICELAND, a dependency on the crown of Denmark, had by the census of 1860 a population of 66,987, concentrated mainly on three districts, and in its physical, political, social and educational condition presents many points of interest. The island comprises about 40,000 square miles, of which more than one-half (26,000 miles) are closed to human occupancy and cultivation by insuperable natural difficulties. Six volcanoes have from time to time within the century, added the terrors of fire to those of perpetual snow and icebergs, and volcanic rocks and icefields and glaciers cover all the interior. It is only along the coast that settlements are possible, and the climate, with its excessive dampness, its extreme and variable conditions of light, heat and cold, limit the industries of the people to fishing, and gathering and converting to use a few natural productions of the soil in their own houses.

The inhabitants are of Scandinavian origin; the island having been colonized by a Norwegian in (or about) 870, and was gradually settled from the mainland by a hardy people, whose institutions were shaped in the beginning of the tenth century into a republic-a government instituted by themselves, for their own benefit, and administered by officers of their own choice. But in this, the law of the strongest prevailed, and it finally took the shape of an aristocracy, until Haco VI. of Norway, in the beginning of the 12th century brought the different chiefs and the whole island under his sway. When Norway was united to Denmark in 1830, Iceland shared its fate, but was not dissevered in the reconstructions of 1814. It still remains a dependency of the Danish crown.

The government is administered by a governor-general appointed by the king of Denmark, and a council (althing) composed of 26 members, of which five are nominated by the crown, and the rest elected by the people one for the town of Reikiavik, and one for each of the twenty syssels, or sheriffdoms into which the four limits (districts) of the island are divided for administrative purposes.

The chief town is Reikiavik (also written Reykjavik, and Reikavig), with a population in 1865 of 1,350 inhabitants, and is the residence of the governor, the place of meeting of the althing, the home of the bishop, and the locality of the college, the observatory, the public library of 8,000 volumes, and the Icelandic Society (established in 1794). Three newspapers are printed here, and since 1530, when the first printing press was set up by Mathieson, a Swede, books have been annually printed in Icelandic-original and translated. Among the latter are versions of Milton's Paradise Lost, and the productions of Shakspeare, Pope and Cowper.

The first formal school came in with the Christian church, about the year 1098, at which time two bishoprics were established by law. In 1540 the Lutheran religious teaching prevailed, and in 1551 was formally established, and the Catholic mass was forbidden. The island now con

stitutes one diocese which is divided into 184 parishes. Every clergyman keeps a register, and is forbidden to solemnize the marriage of any female who cannot read. By thus providing for each household a mother who can read, the basis and agency of domestic instruction is secured, as Pestalozzi aimed to secure the same by his Leonard and Gertrude, and How Gertrude Teaches her Children, for Switzerland. And it is rare to find a native born Icelander who can not read and write. The only school of a higher order is now at Reikiavik (until 1846 at Bessestad or Bessastadir, near Keikiavik) with six teachers and a library of 2,000 volumes. Pupils who wish to pursue the study of law or medicine, must resort to Copenhagen. In the home college there is a theological course, and besides Latin, the French and German languages are taught.

The instruction of children is mainly domestic. Each house is a school of intellectual, religious, and industrial training, after a crude fashion. The long winter evenings are given to reading, to traditional lore, to in-door occupation (by which every child is trained to such handicrafts as the necessities of their position require-making fishing-tackle, boats, casks, sails, &c.), and the women to knitting, and working up moss, skins, feathers, and eider-down into marketable and domestic use. Every able-bodied adult can do something for a livelihood; and the highest dignitary of Iceland-judge, governor, or bishop, can, if occasions require, shoe his own horse, and repair his own boat and tackle, or land vehicle, and harness.

Under such conditions of physical destitution and isolation, with such restricted means of formal instruction, the general education, the language and literature of Iceland are subjects, not only of historical but of living interest to the scholar and statesman. The language is now nearer the standard of that used in old Scandinavia, than in any portion of the Scandinavian peninsula. Its literature, developed in such form and substance, as early as the twelfth century, as not only to reflect and perpetuate the beliefs and manners of the people through successive generations, but has imparted its inspiration to bards and historians far beyond the narrow limits and population for which it was originally produced. The prose-poem called the Edda, collected in its present form in 1192, and the Chronicles or Sagas, which contain the mythology of the North, before and after it was influenced in the popular beliefs by the spread of Christianity, still attract the attention of the antiquary, the ethnologist, and philologist.

But the condition of the people, wresting a scanty support from such hostile elements, so isolated from the civilizing influences of a varied commerce, living in such rude structures devoid of nearly every convenience as well as the facilities of common cleanliness of a well ordered dwelling, inter-marrying among blood relations—is anything but satisfactory, in spite of universal intelligence of a low grade, or of an honesty in ordinary dealings, which may be as much the result of the absence of temptation, as of religious teaching.