pupils in preparatory schools should direct their efforts mainly to meeting these specific demands of the colleges, and should subordinate the intrinsic importance of studies to their serviceableness in securing admission to college, is the only result that could be expected. Neither teacher nor pupil could be much blamed, for instance, for practically setting the writing of good Latin above the writing of good English. It is plain that the only remedy for this grave evil is for the colleges to show, by the nature of their admission-examinations, that they will not accept the rudiments of scholarship as amends for deficiences in the rudiments of education. The colleges, as the representatives of the value of the study of the classics, should be especially careful not to give plausibility, by any act or neglect of theirs, to the groundless assumption that the discipline of mind secured by the preliminary classical training must be purchased by sacrifice of some knowledge which a well-educated young man of 18 ought to possess. Co-operation on the part of the leading colleges is much needed in enforcing upon teachers, and in enabling them to enforce upon their pupils, the necessity of thorough training in all the elements of a sound education. As soon as those colleges unite in demanding of candidates for admission a thoroughly good training in English no less than in classical subjects, the schools which feed the colleges will in turn be able to exact from the lower schools an efficiency which they now greatly lack. The service which American colleges could thus indirectly render to American education it is difficult to overestimate. Were a good degree of proficiency in a well-constructed course of English studies strictly enforced as a condition of admission into our leading colleges, the quality of education received by all pupils in all schools directly or remotely affected by such action would be sensibly improved. Hitherto a too exclusive concern for preliminary training in the classics and mathematics has cut off the higher institutions for education in this country from a part of that influence upon the lower, which it is both their interest and their duty to exercise. Students in institutions for superior instruction.-The following table shows the estimated population in each State between 16 and 20 years of age, the number of students reported in the colleges, in schools of science, and in institutions for the superior instruction of women, and the number of these students in the several States to each thousand of the population between the stated ages. Statistical summary of number of students, &c., in institutions for superior instruction. The following statement shows the number of institutions and departments of this class, with instructors and students, as reported to this Office, in each year from 1870 to 1873, inclusive. The numbers under 1873 include the National Military and Naval Academies : The following are summaries of the statistics as reported in Table IX of the appendix: |