3 723.

perience might be rewarded and not placed on an equality with the meagre knowledge and inexperience of the youth of sixteen years. He recommended a salary at £40 for the first two years, one of £50 for the next three years and the highest one of £60 for those who had been found competent and skillful in method. He urged that when the existing scarcity of teachers had disappeared the standard of age should be raised, and twenty-one years be then demanded as eighteen ought to be forthwith.

In the year, he had visited 169 country schools (six being closed through sickness) with location, number, enrollment and at- tendance as follows:

Prince county, schools 30, enrollment 1,338, attendance 792; Queens county, schools 94, enrollment 4,880, attendance 3,077 ; Kings county, schools 45, enrollment 2,319, attendance 1,431. And also Acadian schools as follows: Prince county, schools 7, enrollment 301. attendance 225; Queens county, schools 6, enrollment 309, attend- ance 2 50.

He noted the miserable nature of the school buildings, often not affording suffi- cient warmth for comfort, the poor equip- ment of the schools, the miscellaneous as- semblage of books that were made to serve the purpose of readers; in one school he found twenty-four children at work, with eleven reading books meant for the same stage of advancement, but all of a difierent kind. He approved the provision that the Legislature had made to supply at cost to the schools a list of excellent books, so that by a trifling local assessment each child had the use of all the books in the school which he was advanced enough to use, but he re- gretted that the privilege had not permitted

PAST AND PRESENT OF

the child to take the books from the school for home preparation of his lessons.

In his report of 1855, Mr. Stark used the table of statistics of schools and school work that is still employed in the superin- tendent’s annual report. It was the first full and definite statement offered by the School Visitors. In it he noted that the attendance at the schools was then one in five of the population showing how fully the act of 1852 had brought the people to a sympathetic support of the schools. He again urged upon the Government to differ- entiate the teachers in salaries according to their varying ability and experience.

In his report of 1856, Mr. Stark men- tioned as the most notable events in the edu- cational history of the year the establishment of an Orphan School for destitute children, which was opened in the early months of the year with an attendance of twenty-six pupils, and the arrival of the headmaster of the Normal School. After much agitation on the part of the School Visitor, the Gov- ernment had made provision by the act of February 19, 1855, for a school of training for teachers, and His Excellency through correspondence with the Stowe Institute at Glasgow, had secured the services of Mr. William Monk as headmaster. He had been a student and afterwards an assistant in the institution, and came with good recom- mendations from its ofiicials and also from Mr. Stark, who had known him in Glasgow. Mr. Monk entered upon his duties on July 22, 1856. As what had been the National School building was not yet ready for the uses of a Normal School, a room in the Central Academy was prepared. and class work was done therein until October I, 1856. when the Normal School was formally