A country probably gets the system of education it deserves. But lucky is that country where education is a natural growth and a tradition rather than the clean-cut system of an expert. Sparta very clearly followed a very ancient tradition—very ancient and very novel, as Xenophon says: παλαιοὶ ὄντες ἔτι καὶ νυ̃ν τοι̃ς ἄλλοις καινότατοί εἰσι—‘new ideals’ in education are usually the oldest.

It is not long since it was commonly thought that the art of blowing glass was known for several thousand years before Christ. Certain Egyptian tomb-paintings of the twelfth dynasty (c. 2OOO b.c.) and later, which really depict metal-workers blowing the flames of their furnace, were thought to represent glass-blowers. As a corollary, it has been said that not a few of the vessels of blown glass found on ancient sites in Greece and other Mediterranean countries belong to the Greek period. Such beliefs are quite incorrect. There is no evidence that the process of blowing glass was invented until about the time of Christ. Scientific excavation in Greece has proved beyond question that any fragments of glass vessels found there belong to Roman or later times; the tombs in Cyprus that contain Hellenistic or earlier pottery contain no blown glass, whereas in tombs of Roman date blown glass tends to displace pottery as funerary furniture; and similar observations have been made during scientific excavations in the other Mediterranean countries.

The following paper (based on a lecture given fairly recently to the members of one of the Board of Education's ‘Short Courses’ for teachers in secondary schools) is largely the result of some twenty-five years' experience as an inspector. If in places it seems to be elaborating the obvious, I can only plead for forgiveness. So much by way of preface.

The physical theories of Democritus were and are profoundly interesting as an attempt to answer some of the great questions of natural science—how to account for growth and change, for the fact that earth turns into corn, corn into men, and men again into earth. The early Ionic philosophers had seen that some necessary common basis must be found, and had sought it in water or fire or some other supposed element. The inadequacy of these explanations soon became evident to the rapidly growing Greek intellect, and Democritus found the common basis in atoms, indestructible and indivisible; an infinite number of these were moving through space, differing in shape and hardness; the movement of the atoms had a certain swerve which enabled them to meet, and the meeting of infinite numbers enabled those of the right shape and texture to join and form the things we see (res in Lucretius). Atoms and void—there was nothing else, and nothing else was needed to produce the world we know. This is a purely physical theory and might be held by Napoleon, Cleopatra, or Charles Peace, nor is it capable of being made the subject of a great poem

The English are a nation of shopkeepers—Napoleon has said it—and as good commercials we travel. Of all those who at one time or another visit Marseilles, our gateway to the South and East, how many, I wonder, even of those who have received a classical education, remember that they are after all but paying the compliment of a return call, since from that port sailed over 2,200 years ago the first Greek expedition τω̃ν ἡμει̃ς ἴδμεν to explore the North and West and visit the British Isles, under the command of Pytheas.

If one may judge by the numerous ‘First Latin Courses’ that have appeared in the last twenty years, it is still the belief of many teachers of Latin that if you wish to render in Latin ‘Don't do it’, you may say either Noli facere, or, at the risk of seeming familiar, Ne feceris; but that the corresponding formula, Ne facias, though good enough for the old comedians, is to be avoided entirely, as conveying merely a ‘general’ prohibition—presumably of the type ‘Do not walk on the grass’—and not a ‘particular’ one.