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Morrison Education Socity
and translating colloquial sentences from English into Chinese, and vice versa. Considering the short period during which they had been attached to the school their examination was very creditable to them, even their occasional blunders in pronunciation, showing that they were conscious of them, and that they were partly attributable to an evident effort to avoid thein.
The elder class was then brought forward, and kept upon the fluor for about two hours, through a variety of exercises. The boys were first called upon to read in the English New Testament, and we observed that to avoid every appearance of set lessons, previously prepared for the occasion, Mr. Brown directed one of the boys to open his book at random, and read what first met his eye. He did so, and read with much fluency and accuracy of pronunciation. The rest followed in order, and in the tones of two or three, there was no foreign accent at all. They then took the Chinese New Testament, and read and trauslated the same into English. The sense was always given, though not always in idiomatic English, which it is difficult for any one to do, without great care and previous practice, the con- structions of the two languages being often opposite to each other. When they afterwards took up a secular reading book, they read and translated with ease into the native colloquial dialect. They then analyzed each sentence, numbering the propositions in each, and pointing out the several parts of these propositions, as the subject, verb, attribute, &c. This exercise exhibited an uncommon insight into this essential part of the study of language.
They were uext examined in geography, in which Mr. Brown re- marked, they had this year received very little instruction. This exercise was short, but sufficiently long to show that they were pretty well versed in topography. It was evident, however, that they felt somewhat embarrassed by the novelty of their position before
strangers.
They then took up mental arithmetic, and showed, by the readı- ness of some of their answers to the questions propounded at random, that they had acquired a good degree of familiarity with this branch of study, and particularly when inet by fractional numbers. They next passed to algebra, first mental and then written. They were tried in simple equations, containing one and two unknown quantities, which they solved readily and accurately, repeating the successive steps in the operations, without the aid of slate or black-board
The same ex- Preise was continued upon the black board, and with the same suc- The part of the exammation which might have been earned
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