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adopted by the Ceylon Code, requiring each scholar to proceed from year to year to higher grades of plain needlework, has become strongly felt. It is the intention of the Department to introduce in the next revision of the Grant-in-Aid Scheme some provision of this sort.

14. OBITUARY.-The Education Department, more than any other branch of the Civil Service of this Colony, suffered, in 1889, by the great loss which the Colony sustained by the death of the Hon. F. STEWART, LL.D. Having served as Headmaster of the Government Central School and as Inspector of Schools for fully sixteen years (1862 to 1878), and then held several other offices, as Police Magis- trate, Registrar General and Colonial Secretary, the late Dr. STEWART continued, until his death, to be the chief adviser of the Government in all educational matters. This continuous and intimate con- nection with the educational Institutions of the Colony for a period of twenty-eight years, gives special value to the following verdict which Dr. STEWART lately pronounced on the educational system now in force in the Colony. "The advance in education is one of the most gratifying features in the progress of the Colony. There is yet much to be done and female education is only in its infancy; "but the lines on which the system is moving seem to be correct and time alone is required to reclaim "those portions of the field which remain untouched." These words, penned by Dr. STEWART but a few days before his death, illustrate most forcibly the unbiassed judgment and honest truthfulness which characterized him throughout his life. For the system, the lines of which he thus generously approved in 1889, is the very system against the initiation of which he waged a desperate war in 1878 and 1879. The position Dr. STEWART occupies in the educational history of the Colony is easily understood. From the year 1847, when the system of State-aided and Government Schools was inaugurated in Hongkong by the Rev. V. STANTON, and down to the year 1865 when the Education Department was established with Dr. STEWART as its Head, the educational policy of the Government had a strict- ly religious character. The leading Missionaries of the Colony, first in time the Rev. V. STANTON, the founder of St. Paul's College, first in power the Rev. Dr. LEGGE, the founder of the Anglo-Chinese College, together with Bishops SMITH and ALFORD, controlled the educational movement of the Colony for eighteen years, under the full sanction of the Government. During this time the Bible was a text- book in nearly all the Schools of Hongkong. The Government Schools were managed as feeders of St. Paul's College and at the annual prize-giving of the Government Schools the Protestant Bishop of Hongkong presided. Dr. STEWART chafed for three years under this system, as Headmaster of the Central School, established by Dr. LEGGE in 1862. But in the year 1865 all this was changed. Dr. STEWART, as Head of the new Education Department, now introduced the reign of an absolutely secular system and admitted, in 1872, Mission Schools to Government Aid on the principle of pay- ment for results ascertained by examination in purely secular subjects. It was actually proposed at a public meeting (25 June, 1872) to make St. Paul's College a feeder of the Government Central School. The Missionaries now chafed under the yoke of the secular and elementary Grant-in-Aid Scheme until the year 1878, when the Catholic and Protestant educationists of the Colony succeeded in obtain- ing from the Government an entire change of policy, which was effected in 1879 by confining the secular system to the Government Schools and by abolishing the secular and elementary limitations of the Grant-in-Aid Scheme. This measure, offering State-aid for the encouragement of religious education, both elementary and secondary, caused the education of the Colony to advance at a tre- mendous bound. In 1878, Dr. STEWART reported 45 Schools with 3,144 scholars as under Govern- ment supervision, and four years afterwards the undersigned, as his successor, had to report 80 Schools with 5,182 scholars as under examination by the Inspector of Schools. When this combination of the secular and religious systems of education was inaugurated in the Colony, the late Dr. STEWART at first strongly protested and fought against it for two years. But as soon as he saw what a happy solution of the educational problem this revised Scheme practically proved itself amid the peculiar difficulties of the Colony, Dr. STEWART withdrew his objections and nothing redounds more to his credit as an educationist than the hearty support he thenceforth gave to the system he had once opposed.

15. I enclose the usual Tables (I to XVI), containing the Educational Statistics for the year 1889, which to some extent have been analysed in the above paragraphs.

I have the honour to be,

Sir,

Your most obedient Servant,

·E. J. EITEL, M.A., PH. D., (Tubing.),

Inspector of Schools.

The Hon. W. M. DEANE, C.M.G.,

Acting Colonial Secretary.