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The greatest advance has been made in English literature and composition—the two branches that are by far the most important in a secondary-school course. The grammar and philology of the Sixth Class is not so good as it was last year by 6 per cent, but its English literature is 6 per cent, better, and its composition 8 per cent, better So good is the composition of these eight girls that, I am satisfied, had they acquired nothing else during their school course, they would be well equipped for success in life. But excellence in composition is not confined to this class it is excellent right through the school—a point that places the school almost in a category by itself amongst the secondary schools of New Zealand, if utility is the first aim in education. No accomplishment is such a valuable outfit for a boy or girl in going out into the struggle of life. But, even if it were not so useful in life, it seems to me to be one of the best tests of intelligence in children, and one of the best instruments for the development of intelligence. Most other subjects may be mastered by a facile memory, and that is generally the bane of clever children. But to deal with whatever new subject is offered to the thoughts, to manipulate it without lapse of good sense, and to give quick expression to the ideas on it without verbiage, means a thorough training of the intelligence , and that all this is possible even in the youngest child that enters a secondary school, I am convinced by my examination of the Girls' High School. But it is a high and difficult task for the teacher to invent methods for the teaching of composition, and the task is generally avoided, inasmuch as the older subjects, like classics and mathematics, have traditional methods and formulas ready for them to apply without any very great stretch of thought. The failure of English in schools as a training of the mind is due to the fact that teachers of classics were the first to turn their attention to the subject, and made it a mere unimportant appendage to their main duties. The methods of classics, then, were necessarily adopted in it—the method of beginning with an elaborate grammatical technology in a language that has few or no inflections, and the method of continuing the study by an elaborate commentary on the text of books which, written as they are in the language of the scholars, need no special elucidation. These methods are good in their place, but their place should be a subordinate one , they should be subordinated in an English school course to composition, as they are subordinated in a classical school course to translation and composition. Every piece of English a pupil deals with he should be taught to transform and put into his own words, every English sentence he reads ho should be taught to recognize the merits and faults of, and to reproduce in different words and order Mere theoretical grammar has gained far too important a place in the teaching of English, and will retain it as long as teachers prefer to communicate information in preference to developing intelligence. I am all the more pleased, therefore, to find English composition take so high a place in this school, whilst the grammatical and philological study of the language and the knowledge of the literature are by no means neglected. In these two latter all the Junior Scholarship work lias been covered by the Upper Sixth, three-fourths of it by the Lower Sixth and the Fifth, and some parts of next year's Junior Scholarship work by the Fourth. But they have not confined themselves to this. All but the first and second classes have studied either a period of English literature or some of the great authors from the side of their life and works, and the upper classes have done very thoroughly Morris's Historical Grammar and part of Earle's Philology To history and geography, which are to be classed with the last two branches of English as training the memory and filling the mind with knowledge more than training the intelligence, the school rightly gives but a small part of its time. No class has spent more than one hour and a half per week on either subject, and one class has spent as little as three-quarters of an hour per week on history and an hour on geography And yet the amount of work covered is very considerable. The Sixth Class, both Upper and Lower, have done in history all the period required for Junior Scholarships, from the reign of Elizabeth to the reign of Victoria, the Upper Sixth has done in geography the physical and political geography of the world, and the Lower Sixth about one-fifth of this. The class that has done the smallest amount of work in history is the Fifth, it has done only the reign of Elizabeth, but it has done it in a very thorough manner, and has gained the highest percentage except the Upper Sixth. This class, which is an extremely intelligent one, might have done in the time allotted to it all the period set for matriculation. As I have not examined this school before in either history or geography, I cannot compare its work this year with that of any former year But I have taken the average of marks obtained by the eight best in history and geography in the University Junior Scholarship examination of last year, and find that it is 54-|- per cent., and the excellence of the school's work will be seen when I state that over the whole of it the average is 57 per cent, in the two subjects taken together, 56 per cent, in history and 58 per cent, in geography, whilst the average of the Sixth or highest class, consisting of eight girls, is 67 per cent.— i.e., 12-J per cent, more than the average of the eight best of the secondary schools in New Zealand last year The two weak points of the school are the First Class and Third. The percentage of each in English is on the whole lower than that of the corresponding classes of last year, whilst in history and geography they have far the lowest percentages in the school. But this is scarcely to be wondered, at, as almost one-half of each class have been in the school only a few months. The Second, which is, on the other hand, almost made up of girls who have been in the school a full year, has gained in all its subjects above 50 per cent., a fact that shows how the lower percentage generally obtained by the lower part of the school is not due to the teaching, but solely to the shorter time the pupils have been under its influence. The three highest classes, which consist almost solely of girls that have been two or more years in the school, are at least 25 per cent, more efficient than the rest of the school, and by far the most intelligent and best-educated girls are those that have obtained all their secondary education in the school. As in former years I have spent the greater part of two days in the school occupied with oral examination, and I have to speak as last year in the highest terms of the discipline and tone all through, the gentlest and most courteous relationships held between teacher and taught the brusquerie of manner which I noticed occasionally in the earlier years of the school—a fanlt that