and accidental improvements; another, and, as far as we can perceive, either in the writings of Dr. Bell, or his friend sir Thomas Bernard, only another improvement of a similar description, was added by Dr. Bell., He introduced a mode of reading and pronouncing by syllables, instead of the common way; thus teaching spelling with great additional ease and accuracy. Having instructed his elder boys in this, as well as the sandwriting, they were found perfectly capable of communicating it to the rest of the school. Various other branches of knowledge, as writing, arithmetick, grammar, bookkeeping, geometry, &c. were all taught in the common way. The school prospered under Dr. Bell's management; and so greatly did some of the pupils advance in their learning, that one of them exhibited philosophical experiments before Tippoo Sultaun, with much success. In 1797, Dr. Bell returned to England, published the pamphlet above alluded to, and then retired into the country; where he resided upon an obscure living at Swanage. The tract excited little or no attention; and he appears to have done absolutely nothing in relation to the subject, for about eight years thereafter.

In 1798, Joseph Lancaster began to exercise the honourable profession of a schoolmaster; and, if we are to give the same credit to his account, which we have given to Dr. Bell's, in the preceding pages, we must add, that he never saw Dr. Bell's publication until the year 1800. His plan was, from the beginning, to teach reading, writing, and arithmetick, to the children of the lower orders, at about half the usual price. Many not being able to pay, even at this reduced rate, he taught them for nothing; and his charities and his labours coming to the knowledge of some more opulent members of society, a subscription was commenced; and, in 1801, he ven

tured, with considerable actual sacrifices, and some additional risks, to convert his seminary wholly into a free school. It is manifest, from this simple statement, for the accuracy of which, many beside Mr. Lancaster can vouch, that the nature of his design, at the very first, turned his attention to every thing which might economize money and labour. If a man were placed in such circumstances, what more obvious means could present themselves, than to save the first great expense of schoolmasters' salaries, by a more rigid adherence than is usual, to a practice in some degree prevalent in all schools; the employment of the elder boys to assist in teaching. Putting out of the question our regard for Mr. Lancaster's veracity (which is, nevertheless implicit) we cannot imagine that it required the assistance of Dr. Bell's pamphlet to give this hint to a man intent on such objects, and who had, himself, been educated at a school where the same thing, though in a more imperfect manner, had been tried. "That school, we are informed, [Fox, p. 13] was organized, on the plan of division into classes, each being superintended by a monitor."

The next great expense of a school arises from the consumption of books, and materials for writing. To save, or greatly to diminish this cost, Mr. Lancaster introduced the admirable method of making a number of boys read from the same lesson, printed in large characters, and suspended on the wall; and the no less useful substitute, of slates for paper; whereby, not only the waste of that expensive article is saved, but any number of boys are enabled to spell and write the same word, at the same time, without the possibility of one being idle, while another is at work; or rather, as in the ordinary modes of education, of nineteen being idle, while one is employed. The same degree of alertness is kept up by the method

of reading, as it were, altogether; which, requiring the failure of one boy to be corrected by the next, for the sake of taking his place, prevents the possibility of idleness or inattention.

It is further evident, that no modification of the old division of classes, with monitors to each, not even when reduced to a system, as in Dr. Bell's scheme, can supply the want of masters for any thing but the simple operations of read. ing and writing. If Dr. Bell, for example, were called upon to make his monitors teach their boys arithmetick, he could only have done it, by himself teaching each monitor to cypher in the ordinary way. Indeed, when sir Thomas Bernard comes to this part of the subject (for, with the amiable solicitude of a friend, he would have the multiplication table itself to form a part of the Madras system) we find that Dr. Bell's scholars are taught to cypher by being examined repeatedly in the tables of the four fundamental rules of arithmetick [p. 58] which is precisely the common way of teaching that science. Here, therefore, was a great step to make; and Mr. Lancaster has made it. He has laid down a method, whereby reading alone is rendered sufficient to make any one teach; he says, arithmetick; we add, every thing; for we see no one science which may not be taught in the same way. But we take Mr. Lancaster's instance of arithmetick. The invention is as simple as it is efficacious; it consists in giving to one boy, who can read, a written or printed particular (if we may so speak) of the operation in cyphering which is to be performed, and making him distinctly read over to any number of boys, furnished with slates, the words and figures given to him. Thus the lesson is to be in addition-234

567

801.

and in order to teach this lesson to thirty boys, one of whom can read, and the other twenty nine can write the nine figures, and understand notation, a key is given to the reader, consisting of the following words: "First column. 7 and 4 are 11; set down 1 under the 7, and carry 1 to the next. Second column: 6 and 3 are 9, and 1 I carried are 10; set down 0 and carry 1 to the next. Third column: 5 and 2 are 7, and 1 I carried are 8. Total, in figures, 801. Total, in words, eight hundred and one." After each boy has written the two lines, 234, and 567, one under the other, the reader takes the above key, and reads it audibly; while each of the twenty-nine obey it, by writing down as it directs. Each boy also reads over the sum total, after the reader has finished; and he then inspects the slates, one after another. The whole are thus kept perpetually awake; and by repeated lessons of the same kind, the rule required is fixed in their minds. It is manifest, that any rule in algebra may be communicated by the same process; from the simplest to the most intricate and refined; from the addition of two quantities, to the methods of infinite series and fluents. Every part of geometrical science may be taught by similar means; from the first proposition in Euclid, to the sublime theorems of Newton and Laplace. It only requires that a form of notation, borrowed from the algebraick calculus, should first be agreed upon. In like manner, whatever branches of natural philosophy admit of a symbolical notation, as the whole of the mixed mathematicks, and, in general, the application of the sciences of number and quantity to experiment, are all capable of being communicated by a person ignorant of them, but able to read, to as many others as can hear the sound of his voice at once. By a few simple additions to this machinery, the method may be made to embrace even other branch

peculiar mode of teaching spelling, which we have already described. He also represents the Madras experiment as, in its fundamental principle, similar to his own method of teaching by monitors; which, however, he seems not to have consider ed as peculiar to either of the new plans, but to have been borrowed, with little variation, from the old

schools.

After the publication of the third edition, and when not only all Mr. Lancaster's improvements had been completed, and fully detailed to the world by his own hand, but also practically exhibited on a very large scale in his schools, Dr. Bell published a second edition of his pamphlet, in some respects greatly enlarged; but omitting several very material documents, which the first had contained. For example: the letter of thanks addressed to him by the four masters of the Male Asylum, and in which they describe themselves as teachers, is left out in the second edition. Such an omission, we acknowledge, is unfortunate, because it greatly benefits the argument of Dr. Bell and his friends, who have attempted to show, that these men were not exactly teachers. Indeed, the second edition makes no mention whatever of those masters; and, suppressing a table of the school which had been given in the first, it substitutes an arrangement closely resembling that of Mr. Lancaster, already both described in print, and exemplified in most successful practice. In 1807, the doctor published a third edition, with more omissions of the same kind, and so many additions, that the original forty eight pages had now swelled into one hundred and fourteen, notwithstanding all that he had suppressed. As a specimen of the additions, we may mention a chapter on the union of schools of industry, with schools of instruction; a topick which had occupied no less than thirty four pages of

Mr. Lancaster's work. He also makes mention of slates and spelling cards, to which no allusion whatever can be found in the two first editions. Mr. Fox now published his "Comparative View," and took notice of those alterations; and, soon after, in 1809, Dr. Bell published a fourth edition, consisting of 348 pages, in which he restores the passages and documents suppressed in the two former editions; and adds a variety of views, which we can scarcely conceive that he should not have taken from Mr. Lancaster. It may suffice to say, that he, for the first time, extols the economy of the Madras plan or system; and recommends it as well adapted to the education of the lower orders; with the exception already commented upon, of writing and cyphering, which he is afraid to trust them with. The assertions, that, by his system, one master can teach one thousand boys; and that it can afford instruction at the rate of 10s. 7s. or 48. according to the number; assertions, which, at the time he wrote them, Lancaster had fully proved, by actually teaching eleven hundred at that rate; but which the Madras plan, as originally described, was utterly inadequate to exemplify. These assertions form a very remarkable feature in the improvements, we regret to say the unacknowledged and unnoticed improvements, which Dr. Bell's pamphlet has, in its progress to the state of a book, derived from the writings and the teaching of Joseph Lancaster.

We are here upon ground which comprises the very gist of the controversy, into which we are forced, so much against our inclination. And as, from the same ground, conclusions will spring, of more general importance than the comparative merits of the two individuals, we must stop the reader upon it for a moment longer. First, as to the number of masters; it seems vain to deny that Mr. Lancaster's school

was the only one, before 1806, in which a single master taught even so many as two hundred boys. The Madras school had Dr. Bell to superintend; a schoolmaster; and three assistant masters. How, then, can we allow Dr. Bell and sir Thomas Bernard to discover, now, that those men had nothing to do with the school, when, in 1797, Dr. Bell particularized one of them [R. Taylor] as having a general charge in one of the school rooms;" and another [F. Johnson] as "the schoolmaster who had a general charge;" when they all four, in their letter of thanks, describe themselves to be "employed as teachers;" and when he, in his answer, treats them all four as "the masters of the Male Asylum;" putting on the same footing, the three assistants and the person whom he allowed to be a schoolmaster properly so called: It is not exactly one of Mr. Lancaster's improvements, that he, even for a body of one thousand boys, requires no one to act like R. Taylor, who has "a general charge in one of the school rooms?" And is not the power of dispensing with R. Taylor, that which enables Mr. Lancaster to boast, that one master can educate one thousand children? Dr. Bell is exactly in the situation in which Mr. Lancaster would have been, had he made this boast; challenged an examination; and allowed us unwarily to discover R. Taylor behind the door, when we went to see whether his pretensions were well founded. He must abide by his Madras school, and be tried by his first edition.

Then, as to the grand point of economy, which is, in truth, every thing in this inquiry; but is only now brought forward by Dr. Bell, and not even now considered as of primary importance by his friend sir Thomas Bernard; it appears that, at Madras, three of the masters had thirty pagodas a month; and there was another, whose salary is not mentioned;

but, take the medium of ten pagodas for each, and we have (at 8s. the pagoda) 167. a month, or 1927. a year. But Dr. Bell was there, likewise, much in the manner in which Mr. Lancaster is in the borough school; and, although he states that he declined all pecuniary recompense in India, Mr. Fox [p. 41] informs us, that in July, 1797, after his return to England, the East India Company settled 2007. a year upon him as a compensation "for his having given up, while at Madras, the remuneration of 4801. a year, to which he was entitled for attending the Male Asylum School." This tallies singularly with the statement of Dr. Bell in his first edition, that the highest salary of a schoolmaster, on the old plan, would be 100 pagodas a month; for this makes exactly the odd sum of 4801. a year. No doubt, then, this was the calculation of Dr. Bell's natural salary; and they who know the honourable company, and their servants at the presidencies,

will have as little doubt that an office of this value has not been suffered to expire for want of occupants. Here, then, we have, in masters' salaries, to begin with, 6721. a year; to which must be added, the rent, and other expenses of a schoolroom. Furthermore, a sum must be set apart for books, writing materials, and rewards; all of which, are, even in the last stage of improvement, to which Dr. Bell has brought his plan, viz. in his last edition, out of all comparison, more costly than in Mr. Lancaster's system. Each child must have all the books used, to the number of fourteen or fifteen, and must use paper, pen, and ink from the beginning of his writing; and the rewards, consisting of so much money by the week, to monitors and boys who excel in each class, amount, as we have calculated from sir T. Bernard's account of the Barrington school, to 387. a year for two hundred boys. It is impossible to esti