PREFACE.

IN the following pages I have endeavoured to give a simple and accurate account of what I saw during a series of visits to some of the Schools and Colleges in the United States, believing that what was of so much interest to me cannot fail to have some attraction for other teachers.

I have not attempted to give many statistics, nor to compile a book with any pretensions to completeness, for which indeed my field of observation has been too limited. I wish simply to give other teachers an opportunity of seeing through my eyes what they cannot perhaps see for themselves, and to this end I have recorded just such particulars as I should myself care to know,

without studying very much any rules of literary art.

I have had the less scruple in omitting much that deserves notice, because the forthcoming Report of Her Majesty's Assistant Commissioner sent to inspect American education will doubtless afford much fuller and more comprehensive information than I could give.

I cannot speak in too high terms of the cordial kindness shown to me and my friend in almost every place of education that we visited, the right hand of fellowship being always extended to us as to those interested in one work, every information being freely given, and every facility offered, with the evidently universal feeling that (as it was expressed to me by one teacher) mutual inquiry into and sympathy in each other's work must be a strengthening of the hands for all. The single exception to the welcome we found everywhere was in the case of a new