The question of the expediency of the system as a whole is not well suited to a sectional discussion.  We shall be much better employed in adverting to some of those details in the conduct of the examinations that have a bearing on the general education of the country, as well as on the Civil Service itself.  It was very well for the Commissioners, at first starting, to be guided, in their choice of subjects and in their assigning of values to those subjects, by the received branches of education in the schools and colleges.  But, sooner or later, these subjects must be discussed on their intrinsic merits for the ends in view.  Indeed, the scheme of Lord Salisbury has already made the venture that Macaulay declined to make; it has absolutely excluded some of the best recognised subjects of our school and college teaching, instead of leaving them to the option of the candidates.

I will occupy the present paper with the consideration of two departments in the examination programme—­the one relating to the PHYSICAL or NATURAL SCIENCES, the other relating to LANGUAGES.

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[COMMISSIONER’ SCHEME OF SCIENCE.]

The Commissioners’ scheme of Mathematics and Natural Science is not, in my opinion, accordant either with the best views of the relations of the sciences, or with the best teaching usages.

In the classification of the Sciences, the first and most important distinction is between the fundamental sciences, sometimes called the Abstract sciences, and the derivative or Concrete branches.  My purpose does not require any nice clearing of the meanings of those technical terms.  It is sufficient to say that the fundamental sciences are those that embrace distinct departments of the natural forces or phenomena; and the derivative or concrete departments assume all the laws laid down in the others, and apply them in certain spheres of natural objects.  For example, Chemistry is a primary, fundamental, or abstract science; and Mineralogy is a derivative and concrete science.  In Chemistry the stress lies in explaining a peculiar kind of force, called chemical force; in Mineralogy the stress is laid on the description and classification of a select group of natural objects.

The fundamental, or departmental sciences, as most commonly accepted, are these:—­1.  Mathematics; 2.  Natural Philosophy, or Physics; 3.  Chemistry; 4.  Biology; 5.  Psychology.  They may be, therefore, expressed as Formal, Inanimate, Animate, and Mental.  In these sciences, the idea is to view exhaustively some department of natural phenomena, and to assume the order best suited for the elucidation of the phenomena.  Mathematics, the Formal Science, exhausts the relations of Quantity and Number; measure being a universal property of things.  Natural Philosophy, in its two divisions (molar and molecular), deals with one kind of force; Chemistry with another:  and the two together conspire to exhaust the phenomena of inanimate nature; being indispensably aided by the laws and formulae of quantity, as given in Mathematics.  Biology turns over a new leaf; it takes up the phenomenon—­Life, or the animated world.  Finally, Psychology makes another stride, and embraces the sphere of mind.