to superintendents of school systems and the heads of institutions number 24 in all. These call in the aggregate for 566 items. The total number of returns made the past year was 7,483, but in order to obtain this number an average of three schedules were mailed to each party who reported. The following exhibit shows the titles of these schedules and indicates the pages where the information is tabulated in this report:

The statistical division of the Bureau, besides tabulating the returns from the schedules, examines and compares the published reports of State and city school systems, the catalogues, yearbooks, and manuals of the several kinds of educational institutions. The division of foreign exchange studies the official reports on foreign systems and all the books published by investigators on those systems, whether in English or in other languages.

Besides the twenty-four regular annual schedules mentioned above, the Bureau undertakes each year some one or more extra inquiries, publishing the results either in the annual report or in a separate circular of information. Examples of this are the chapter on "kindergartens," published in the report of last year (1890-91); also the report on legal education in the different countries of the world, and the report showing all public libraries of over one thousand volumes, prepared by the statistical division and published as a separate circular of information.

To some extent special inquiries by clerks detailed from the office are made, as, for example, those into art and industrial instruction by

Mr. I. Edwards Clarke, and into laboratory work in educational pathology by Dr. Arthur MacDonald.

It has been the practice of the Bureau since the begining to obtain from experts special treatises on various topics of interest as they awaken public inquiry.

EDUCATION IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES.

France. In Chapter III (pp. 73-96) a brief survey is given of the educational system of France, abridged from the more extended study made in a previous report. To this is appended an account of the important operations of the year 1892. France, since it began the work of educating the whole people, has been a profitable object lesson for the study of methods of organization, instruction, and course of study. There is no field on which a more interesting experiment is in progress. Will the universal education of the people develop local centers of self-government, or are the course of study and the methods employed such as to make it a second nature for the inhabitants of the provinces to look to Paris for each and every initiative? It is interesting to note in this connection (p. 91) that the provincial centers now show 13,287 university students, while Paris has only 10,110, whereas Paris had the larger number five years before.

The history of education in China shows that a nation may have a universal system of school education and yet develop little or no local self-government. If the memory is the chief faculty cultivated, and the course of study includes little else besides the sacred codes of morals and religion, the result is to fill the mind with the traditional forms of thinking and acting. Whence it results that the child learns to think and act and to take precisely the view of the world that his fathers took before him. The more education in Confucius and Mencius the more safely conservative will be the life of each new inhabitant in China. But on the other hand, let the child start in a kinder. garten and develop self-activity along all the lines of his character; let him continue his studies in the primary and grammar schools, cultivating the habits of observation and scientific investigation; let him keep abreast with scientific research; let him have access to the literature of the world, and he will find a constant stimulus toward freedom and local self government; toward emancipation from authority.

The fact that France lays great stress on scientific methods in its schools, therefore, goes to show that the universal education there in progress is an education that moves toward decentralization. The influence of Paris will now help emancipate the provinces, and each other city in France will develop within itself its own Paris. Meanwhile Paris will grow all the more in its influence on the world as one of the three great modern civilizing powers.

Great Britain and Ireland.-In Chapter IV is given a brief survey of education in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, supplementary to

statements printed in the report of 1888-89, in which the system of England, and the report of 1889-90, in which that of Scotland, were presented historically. In 1891 school fees were remitted in the Gov. ernment elementary schools. The statistics of the past year show an increase of attendance due to this fact, and the elementary schools of England now enroll 17.13 per cent of the population. The number of schools under municipal school boards has increased, and they now enroll 40 per cent of all pupils. The private and parochial schools still enroll 60 per cent, while the private and parochial schools in the United States enroll only 10 per cent of the pupils.

The struggle of the friends of the parochial schools will doubtless have a purifying and beneficial effect on the management of schools under public-school boards. The fire of opposition saves much wasteful experiment by exposing the weak features of a system in advance of the actual trial by experiment. In England the old challenges the new and pours upon it a storm of ridicule; points out its inconsistencies and want of logic; praises the good old way; foresees the dreadful consequences to church and state of the new plans if carried out. Such a winnowing of a new scheme lets through only the best and wisest features, and the progress is continuous if slow. There is much less of the pendulum movement in English reform, less swinging from one extreme to another, which "marks time," but does not march.

Meanwhile, an equal amount of interest exists for us in the course of study and methods of instruction pursued in English schools but not the same kind of interest that we found in those of France. Englishspeaking peoples have for centuries insisted on local self-government. We do not feel so anxious to see the modes by which English schools secure independence and freedom of local centers as to see how they correct tendencies to extreme individualism and provincialism. What place does English literature hold in the education of English and Irish and Scotch youth? There are more first-class poets in England at the present time than in all the rest of Europe, and the total roll of its poets and dramatists of high order of merit is also greater than that of the rest of Europe. The social and political atmosphere of this people, with its national idiosyncrasy tending to personal adventure and local self-government, seems to favor the evolution of poets. The poet makes public opinior by uttering his view of the world in beautiful forms of speech and canvassing the grounds and motives that tell in its favor. An education. in the national poetry of England therefore furnishes the needed unifying influence for its adventure-seeking people. They form, whether in Great Britain or in English-speaking colonies, a nation whose rule is chiefly that of public opinion, fed by the national poets and novelists, and expressed in its organ, the daily newspaper.

It is of interest to note that the enrollment of children in the schools of Ireland slightly exceeds that of England, being 17.34 per cent of the population. Here the same investigation, as to the course of study and ED 92-II

methods of instruction, is necessary in order to answer the question whether this system of universal education is to settle the Irish political problem.

Chapter V gives a summary of the reports on technical instruction in Great Britain, showing the status of the great movement inaugurated after the first world's fair, when English statesmen learned that certain other countries surpassed their own in the artistic finish of goods.

Germany, Austria, Switzerland.-In Chapter VI the present operations of the schools for training teachers in the German speaking nations are discussed in the light of their history. Much interesting matter is to be found in the courses of study of those institutions.

In Chapter VII an historical and statistical review is given of the Swiss school system. In Chapter VIII is an interesting study of the schools of Vienna as regards the home influences of 9,000 children aged from 10 to 14. The article is translated from Franz Schoberle and is a contribution to the vast subject of child-study now gaining so large a place in educational literature. In last year's report I printed Dr. Francis Warner's studies made on 50,000 children of the London schools in respect to physical and mental condition, a noteworthy contribution to this same subject of child-study. In Chapter IX (pp. 239-246) are to be found notes on school museums in various parts of the world. Inasmuch as no complete list has been printed of such museums, contributions to such a list are desired. In Chapter X is given a translation of a remarkable article on the character and historical development of the German universities by Professor Paulsen, of Berlin, supplemented by a statistical review of the subject by Professor Conrad, of Halle. It is one of the noblest contributions made to the Columbian Exposition. The civil service in France and Prussia.-Chapter XI contains the results of a special investigation made by experts for the Bureau into the schools for recruiting the civil services in France, and an account of the civil service requirements in Prussia. Prussia and France stand in the foremost rank of the world for the perfection of their civil serv

In the infancy of our American system we naturally have much to learn from them in this particular. Prof. Herbert B. Adams's excellent suggestion of an academy in Washington for the training of candidates for civil service, is given a place in this chapter (pp. 410-412). A brief survey of the education of Sweden, together with some account of current operations, is given in Chapter XII.

PHYSICAL TRAINING.

In Chapter XIII is given an historical sketch of physical training, together with a careful study of the systems in use in this country, namely, the Swedish, the German, Dr. Sargent's, and that of Delsarte. This elaborate article is closed with suggestions regarding school gymnasiums, and tabular views showing the statistics of physical training in the city schools of the United States.

I am not convinced that the present theory of physical education, as taught in the schools, gives enough weight to the bodily conditions that favor the restoration of nervous energy.

It is well known that physical exercise affects directly the muscular system, and that the muscular system is not all of the body, nor, indeed, itself directly the generator of what I have called nervous energy. There is a nutritive process of digestion and a distributive process of circulation through the heart and lungs and liver, the two forming a building-up function which restores, repairs, and increases the organism and removes the waste. There is, besides, a nervous organism which receives impressions from without and sends out impulses that react on the environment.

Physical training, as we understand it, deals directly and chiefly with the muscular system and with that part of the nervous system which conveys impulses from the brain outward through the limbs to the environment. Physical exercise indirectly acts on the digestion and the circulatory system and on the nerves of sensation, and its relation to those other bodily functions is nearly or quite as important as the direct relation of exercise to the muscles and the acquiring of strength.

During the first fifty years of agitation on the subject of bodily training, connected with the rise of Turner societies in Germany and the preaching of the gospel of bodily culture as auxiliary to intellect and will by Spurzheim, his disciple, George Combe, and their numerous followers, we may say without hesitation that the doctrine of physical exercise was passing through its stage of superstition and quackery. There was a sharp dividing line between the believers in hygiene and the old school of physicians, and this separation led quite naturally to dismal results. The doctors opposed with blind conservatism the new apostles, and the latter justified the attitude of the former by a radicalism equally blind and fanatical.

It is the glory of the present revival of physical exercise that it is led by educated physicians. It is a new movement of the highest importance, the establishment of a resident physician in each of our colleges as supervisor of gymnastics and recording inspector of physical development among the students. It means a synthesis of science with reform and the end of the era of quackery in hygiene.

But it is not something that can be matured all at once. There is a fringe of the old fanaticism which still attaches to the new movement, and consequently an unreasonable conservatism, which is the result of a reaction against obvious quackery. The regular medical directors of physical exercise are reducing their observations to a statistical form, ard are rejecting many of the principles supposed to be fixed in former times. They are dispelling many old illusions. They are widening the survey of effects direct and indirect. Already we are beginning to have a harvest of treatises which record the more scientific observations. The old athletism in a college produced a small quota of splendidly