The Sun.
London, England, 1859-09-19 00:00:00

of the masters. It became evident they held such
imperfect knowledge to be quite sufficient,
or they would not thus have placed the
pupils in the hands of the examiners. The
examinations of last year have at least had
the good effect of reversing the proportions of
the rejected. This time less than half were rejected
at the preliminary examinations. Too many still;

yet a great improvement on last year.
Sincerely do we hope the improvement will con-
tinue. We entirely agree with Sir JOHN COLE-
RIDGE in the remarks made by him in his
speech at Exeter, at the distribution of the certifi-
cates awarded by the Examiners, for instance,
and which appeared in Saturday's Sun, on the vast
importance of thorough elementary instruction—
"sticking to the elements," an d permitting " nothing
to supersede accuracy in the lower and rudimental
parts of education." He gave some curious illustra-
tions of his meaning. An examiner found
lads puzzled to set down from dictation sums
for addition. " Suppose, for instance, he said,
set down, a thousand and forty-nine, not one in
the class was able to put down that sum
correctly; they could not make count for the
ciphers" ! So he inverted sentences, such as "my
right there is none to dispute," they could not tell
what governed " right." How common we fear
has such incapacity been among thousands for whom
confiding parents had paid, for their means, very
handsomely. It may be hoped that the new
examinations will soon render such hurried and
superficial teaching a thing of the past.
But the principle adverted to by Sir JOHN COLE-
RIDGE is one which cannot be too conscientiously
applied in the teaching of children. The great
benefit of school education should be, not the mere
amount of knowledge communicated, but the habit
of acquiring knowledge thoroughly. Sir JOHN'S
description of the way in which his teacher initiated
him into the first book of Homer is the description
of what should be done with every boy, in everything
he learns at school. " The boy is father to the man,"
and had boys generally been disciplined never to
rest content without such an understanding as boys
could have of whatever they took in hand, the men
into whom such boys grew up, would both have the
desire to master, thoroughly, every subject of inte-
rest or utility to them, and the sense not to
form precipitate judgments before adequate
investigation. They might never be able to
open their " Horace," their "Homer," or their
"Euclid" after they left school, but the habits ac-
quired by their studies, if required to be thorough
would never be lost. Like military gait, or the
sailor's walk, it would accompany them ever after

for life.
The middle classes will owe very much to the
University Examiners if they compel the school-
masters to think more of the quality than area
of instrnction. A youth fond of study
or reading may add what he pleases in after
years, according to his leisure and means ; but
if he have not in his first lessons formed the essential
conception of what right study is, he will rarely
acquire it for himself. Boys should be taught tho-
roughly, as far as they are taught. If they cannot
be taken, for instance, beyond a small portion of
Cesar and Virgil, yet if up to that point
they have been throughly drilled in the language,
been made to see its relation to our own, or to
French, if they read that also, and been made
masters of the principles, not the mere rules, of
etymology an d grammatical construction, they
Steam Navigation. As it is also upon record how
" to oppose her, or to run away if they could with
the merit of being first, to cross the Atlantic, an
inefficient steamer was started from Cork eight days
before her, but the absurdity was soon made apparent
by the two vessels arriving on the same day"—not-
withstanding the Cork one had those days prece-
dence ! But further, is it not, there, also upon
record how " the supply of fuel on board the Cork
steamer was exhausted, while the Great Western,
notwithstanding the predictions of Dr. LARDNER,
had coals enough left to steam four days longer at
her full rate of consumption." Finally, there is
this crowning triumph of his life, this grandest
achievement of his:engineering genius—The Great
Eastern Steamship—the most gigantic vessel ever
set afloat upon the great deep since the waters of the
Deluge subsided! No wonder, with a recollection
of those marvellous works vividly brought to mind
by late the lamented and premature demise of Mr.
BRUNEL, no wonder that one of the earliest to
grieve over the tidings of that regretted death
should speak of " the stupendous talents" of the con-
structor of the Great Western Railway and of the
Great Eastern Steamship ! In the phrase, there
is no exaggeration—for the talents of this remark-
able were, in very deed and in simplest truth, no-
thing less than stupendous. After times, in view-
ing his Grand Works both upon sea and upon land,
and those too of his great and worthy contemporary,
ROBERT STEPHENSON, may say with reason and
without hyperbole, as has been said of earlier gene-
rations in the history of the world, " There were
Giants in those days !" The works actually com-
pleted by the genius of this one man—now, alas !
no more—are like the works of the Cyclops. The
fabled thunderbolts forged upon the anvil of Vul-
can were hardly grander to dream of, than the limbs
of those gigantic engines heaving and throbbing in
the iron caverns of the Great Eastern. As one of the
formest, as in some respects about the very fore-
most among the great material benefactors of his
time and of his country, the genius of BRUNEL is
indeed entitled to our earnest and lasting admira-
tion, his memory is indeed worthy of being per-
manently held in England's grateful remembrance.

Scarcely anyone to whom that Great Name was
in any way familiar, but will have learnt with pro-
found emotion that—in what seemed the very hey-
day of his mid-career—Mr. BRUNEL breathed his
last on Thursday night, the 15th of this present
month of September. It is an immense eulogium
—yet, at the same time, it is but the simplest truth
—to say of him that he was one of the greatest of
all the great engineers in this great age of engi-
neering. He was so confessedly—he was recognised
as such during his lifetime by universal consent.
His many wonderful achievements are the attesta-
tions of the reasonableness of this eminent reputa-
tion. He has left the impress of his genius
indelibly marked upon his Age and upon his
Country.
Immediately upon his birth, now scarcely fifty-
four years ago, ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL may
be said, and that hardly alone figuratively, to have
been cradled in the lap of Science. His distin-
guished father, Sir MARK BRUNEL, was at that time
engaged in the fabrication in the dockyard at
Portsmouth, of what still remains to this day
among
the number of the world's wonders—the
marvellously
complicated. block machinery ! That
astonishing maze of a el ioateyetpowerful mechanism,
in their mysterious passage through which, mere
shapeless fragments of wood and lumps of metal
appear to be all but instantaneously tramformed in to
smooth and perfected blocks for the rigging of our
men-of--war ! Between his birth in 1806, at Ports-
mouth, and his death in 1859, at 18, Duke-street,
Westminster, BRUNEL the
younger has in many
proved Werthy
ways rjobly himself to be w ert of his
eminent progenit4,,
,r• • It appears indeed to be a
1 , -