Directory_and_Chronicle_1842 — Page 194

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Report of Chinese School:

MARCH

Such, the Chinese would have us believe, was Fuli's knowledge of lexicography. Modern writers have improved on this system, re- taining the six classes, subdividing and arranging under them all the characters of the language. The regulation of times and seasons, the rites and usages of domestic and social life, the administration of government, and the cultivation of music, all engaged the attention of this illustrious patriarch-this son of heaven. His reign was 115 years. Some writers say that his immediate successors were fifteen in number, and reigned 17,787 years.

ART. VIII. Report of Chinese schools for boys and girls under the care of the Rev. Alexander Stronach and Mr. R. T. Grylls, at Penang.

"OUR boys are all under engagements for a definite number of years, five, six, or seven,-according to their ages on entering school. The penalty for leaving before their terms expire is to refund $2 for every month the boys shall have been supported here. This penalty has been enforced in two cases, so they all feel that their engage- ments are binding.

"The boys all read Chinese. The first class of them read througli two books of Confucius; but I then thought that, in future, all their reading should be Christian, for I saw them but too ready to fall into the Chinese notion, that all wisdom rested with their heathen sages. Since that time, they have read through Collie's Shing King, Mcd- hurst's Shin Lun, &c., and now they are reading the New Testament in Chinese. The boys of the second class are now reading in the gospel harmony; those of the third class is Medhurst's Lun Yü; and the fourth class in his three character book. All that the boys read in Chinese is explained to them both in the colloquial Fukien and in English. Twenty of the boys daily write in the Chinese character; their autographs are herewith sent.

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Daily, at our morning worship, the more advanced boys read and translate into Chinese some part of the English Old Testament; and all the others, except one newly come, read in the New Testament, render the verses they read into Chinese; while the whole is ex- plained to the boys assembled in the English and Chinese language