The State College of Maine provides courses for both civil and mechanical engineers, and has two shops equipped according to the Russian system.  Forge and vise work are taught in them, though it is not the object of the college so much to teach the details of any one trade as to qualify students by general knowledge to undertake any of them afterward.  A much more complete and thorough technical education is given in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at Boston, where there are distinct classes for civil, mechanical, mining, geological, and architectural engineering.  The following are the particulars of the instruction in the architectural branch, which commences in the student’s second year, with Greek, Roman, and Mediaeval architectural history, the Orders and their applications, drawing, sketching, and tracing, analytic geometry, differential calculus, physics, descriptive geometry, botany, and physical geography.  In the third year the course is extended to the theory of decoration, color, form, and proportion; conventionalism, symbolism, the decorative arts, stained glass, fresco painting, tiles, terra-cotta, original designs, specifications, integral calculus, strength of materials, dynamics, bridges and roofs, stereotomy.  In the fourth year the student is turned out a finished architect, after a course of the history of ornament, the theory of architecture, stability of structure, flow of gases, shopwork (carpentry), etc.

The number of students in this very comprehensive Institute of Technology was, by the latest report, 390, of whom 138 were undergoing special courses, 39 were in the schools of mechanical art, and 49 in the Lowell School of Practical Design.  Tuition is charged at the rate of 200 dols. for the institute proper, and 150 dols. for the mechanical schools, the average expenses per student being about 254 dols.  There are 10 free scholarships, of which two are given for mechanical art.  The Lowell School has been established by the trustee of the Lowell Institute to afford free technical education, under the auspices of the Institute of Technology, to both sexes—­a large number of young women availing themselves of it in connection with their factory work at Lowell.  The courses include practical designs for manufactures, and the art of making patterns for prints, delaines, silks, paperhangings, carpets, oilcloth, etc., and the school is amply provided with pattern looms.  Indeed, the whole of the appliances for practical teaching at the Institute are on such a complete scale that at the risk of being a little tedious it is as well to enumerate them.  They comprise laboratories devoted to chemistry, mineralogy, metallurgy, and industrial chemistry; there are also microscopic, spectroscopic, and organic laboratories.  In other branches there are laboratories and museums of steam engineering, mining, and metallurgy, biology and architecture, together with an observatory, much used in connection