work,-to calculate the quantity of raw materials that could be worked up, and the quantity of manufactured product that could be turned out of such a factory,-to determine from the current prices, the cost of labour, of materials, charging for risk, and ultimately return a financial statement of the amount of profit that might be expected, or if so, to what extent the branch of manufacture might be, under existing circumstances, a source of loss.

If, on the other hand, his profession is to be a constructor of machines, he is required to give in similar plans, for the most profitable investment of a certain capital in flax mills, silk mills, cotton inills, etc. as the examiners may propose,-to determine the greatest number of looms and spindles that could be driven with that capital,-the amount of raw material necessary for keeping those machines at work,—the amount of produce, rate of loss by wear and all sources of failure,-and, as before, to return a calculation of the amount of profit or loss which the speculation would be likely to produce.

For a civil engineer, the best conditions under which specified works could be carried on, the practicability of certain sug gestions, the relative economy of others. Plans for the employment of capital in railways or canals between places,-the probable traffic, and geographical conditions of which are given,-are also required.

For the miner and metallurgist, it is necessary to present drawings of the best plans for draining and ventilating shafts of specified depths and inclinations,-to arrange a series of dressing, picking, and smelting houses, on a scale commensurate to the produce which the supposed mine is calculated to afford,-to examine and report on the modes of excavation and smelting adopt ed in various countries, their relative cost, -the local circumstances which might induce the adoption of one or of another, and to explain their scientific theories.

one in Naples, and up to last summer there had been constructed in different parts of Europe six extensive factories, exactly according to that plan.

There are two copies of each memoir made out, and all plans and drawings are lithographed in the school. The author retains one copy, the other belongs to the school; and, during their second and third years of study, the pupils are occupied in copying the plans, and familiarizing themselves with the arrangement and style of the best productions of their predecessors, and thus, the student becomes the possessor of a great collection of drawings, plans, and estimates, which no person but a pupil of the school can have access to.

The immediate details of the course of study we do not purpose now entering into; they embody a vast and complete course of education for each practical profession; and the most eminent men of Paris are numbered among its professors.

So remarkably successful has this institution been, that the French government has often attempted to get some hand in its arrangement. At first, they proposed that the state should pay part of its expenses, such as rent, &c. Then, that the professors should be salaried by the state. Both of these propositions were refused. At last the minister of public works granted to the prefect of each department a certain sum (in all 17,000 francs) to pay the expenses of educating at the school a number of young men, two or three from each department, who should get those places at a public examination to be held annually in the chief town of each department. this of course, the council of the school could not object; all they wanted by keeping it a private school, being, that a student on receiving his diploma should be at full liberty to employ his energies as he liked best, and not to be tied up to the government in any way.

To

Our space does not allow us to allude to the arrangements of other similar institutions in Belgium, in Prussia, and even in Austria, but we shall briefly notice what has been very recently done, much nearer home, in England.

why the want was more keenly felt, and that the success of the attempt appeared more probable than in other places. But long before that time, in 1825, Mr. John Taylor, one of the most extensive and best informed mining proprietors in England, printed a prospectus, which now lies before us. After a masterly survey of the injury caused by the want of knowledge on the part of the superintendants and workers of the mines in Cornwall, and describing the benefits which would ensue from their being properly educated to their business; he laid down the plan for the formation of a school of mines, in which the branches of science and art, which are of use in mining and metallurgy, should be taught. His scheme was nearly that, though much less extensive, which we have ourselves felt the beneficial effects of in Freiburg, (Saxony) except that the mining school of Freiburg, (Berg Academie) is supported by the state, whilst Mr. Taylor proposed that the Cornish school of mines should be supported by contributions from the mine proprietors of the district. Mr. Taylor's plan fell to the ground at that time, but last summer, Sir Charles Lemon, the munificent member for Cornwall, although himself not a mining proprietor, offered to carry the whole plan into effect almost at his own expense, on certain conditions, one of which, we regret to say, was, that the college should belong to a particular form of religion. At the same time both colleges of the university of London have opened engineering courses. In King's College, Mr. Daniell, Mr. Moseley, Mr. Cooper, and Mr. Tennant, form an excellent body of professors; but, unfortunately, the extent of education proposed, is very circumscribed, and we fear that the diploma of civil engineer from King's College is not likely to require much knowledge. In University College, as far as we could learn, they have not advanced even so far. In addition, there has been, within the last year, established at Kentish Town, near London, a distinct College of Engineering. While all this activity has been manifested upon the Continent and in England, what has been done here? Absolutely nothing; and yet there is no country in the world in which practical education is more required, or in which it would be productive of more immediate benefit, and there never was a time so well calculated for its favourable reception as the present. Our country has just emerged from the whirlpool of political discontent and social enmity, which had

bound down in fetters of adamant her legitimate industrial capabilities for centuries. Her people are peaceable, temperate, and endowed with energy and industry adapted to succeed in the most laborious tasks, and minds as capable of intellectual attainments as those of any other race. We are now first beginning to appreciate the inexhaustible sources of wealth, which our fertile soil, our mountains rich in the most productive ores, our coasts thronged with the most valuable fish, and adapted to the most profitable traffic, present to our acceptance; and we have discovered by the arrangement of levels in the interior of the country, that for facilities of internal transport by railways or canals, Ireland is not to be excelled. It only remains that to utilize those great natural advantages, we should become educated to those practical professions, for which the institutions already noticed have been established in other countries. To work our mines successfully, we must become skilful mining engineers and metallurgists. develope, without the extravagant expense and ruinous loss, through which success has been gained in England, the internal communication by railways, and the navigation of our lakes and rivers, we must become well educated civil engineers. To manufacture with success we must learn our respective trades, for as the Morning Chronicle very plausibly said when commenting on one of the Irish manufacture meetings lately held, to succeed we should have capital, and we are poor-we should be educated, and we are ignorant-we must be orderly and quiet, and our trades are combined in a system of intimidation. We have therefore our success to make. We possess all the materials for a complete success, if only we be true to ourselves and to our country.

But it may be asked cannot our young men learn these things in England? Will not a short time spent in Manchester, with Sharp and Roberts, or with Fairbarn, make a better machinist than could be effected in Dublin by any system of education? We say, no-we say that a young man who learns to make one steam engine in Mallet's or in Robinson's is as well educated as if he saw one hundred of the same sort made in Manchester, and that in those great establishments, the education of the apprentice is not the direct object of the owner. A young man after paying a large fee to become apprentice in an engine factory, and thus giving up for seven years, his whole time to the service of his master, is taught nothing. He may learn a great deal—he is placed under

very favourable circumstances for learning, but the information he acquires, is taken by himself, and is not communicated to him. He may come out when his apprenticeship is over, an accomplished machinist, but he may also be found, and we have met several such,―incapable of passing a step out of the routine of the workshop in which he had spent his time, skilled in one or two mechanical operations, but ignorant of the principles by which their success in after life must be decided. It must be recollected that whilst a workman is to learn facts, the superintendant requires principles, and in the large machine factories of Manchester, principles are not taught.

In mining operations it becomes especially necessary that the education of the miner should be peculiarly directed to the country where he is afterwards to work. The results of mining enterprize depend on a minute appreciation of all the circumstances of the geology of the district. A miner educated in Cornwall, or in Northumberland, is totally at fault when he goes to work in Wicklow, Waterford, or Clare, and must be educated over again in a knowledge of the country, before he can be of much use. The composition of the adhering rock, the nature of other minerals occasionally mixed, may affect very much the metallurgic processes subsequently required.

But we do not at all admit the principle that we should be obliged or expected to go to England for education which we should have offered to us, equally good, at home. We do not approve of the system, which was very graphically described to ourselves by a member of a government board, one day after dinner, when his heart was a little opened,that we must get every thing of importance done here by Englishmen and Scotchmen for a generation or two, and perhaps then, by having looked on so long, the Irishmen might gradually be allowed to take such things into their own management. We

believe that the sooner we begin to learn, the better, and that men learn a great deal quicker by working with their own hands than by merely looking on. We are, therefore, for education in the practical professions, carried on at home and by Irishmen, for we decidedly maintain that our city possesses more than enough of men eminently qualified for such a task. Indeed, since we commenced writing on this subject, a pamphlet has been placed in our hands, printed last year, from which we learn, that as a private speculation, Mr. Gregory, a distinguished civil engineer of this city, has actually founded a school of civil engineering, based upon principles, which coincide very closely with those which we have endeavoured to show should regulate instruction in that branch. We learn that Mr. Gregory's plan has been attended with considerable success, both to himself and to the students whom he has had under his care. But a private institution such as his, cannot fulfil the great object of complete practical education for the country at large, and hence, notwith.. standing that we wish him and his pupils all the success that their enterprise and perseverance so well deserve, we yet contemplate the plan of engineering education which he has proposed, and the favourable manner in which it has been received by those interested in that branch of science, as indicating only the great want of education that had existed, and not by any means that the want has been supplied.

We would advise, therefore, all those that wish to see Irish manufacture rapidly and steadily established, our mining and agriculural capabilities properly developed, the internal communication and foreign commerce of the country advanced and extended to the degree which a bounteous Providence, by its geographical position, and geological structure, has indicated as its due to provide for sound practical education, in engineering, agriculture, mining, and manufactures.

If we do not some time or other possess a good history of the half century that preceded the Union-a period not only so remarkable in the history of Ireland, but also, as regards the general experience of the world, so novel in many of its aspects, so startling in many of its results-it will certainly not be for want of materials of sufficient copiousness and variety. The lives of Charlemont, Flood, Grattan, Curran, Tone, and Fitzgerald, have already been written, if not always with the requisite courage and impartiality, at least with care and ability a good deal above the average of biographies. The historical compilations of Plowden, Macneven, Barrington, Seward, and others, although none of them of a high order, are yet, as the productions of cotemporaries and eye-witnesses, full of instruction for the candid enquirer. The host of pamphlets also, with which the press teemed during the entire of that eventful struggle, affords a wide field for research, and one whose riches are as yet unknown and unexplored: to this class of writings the efforts of Swift and Lucas had, at an earlier period, given an influence and importance scarcely paralleled in any other country, and which tended in some degree to compensate for the scantiness and inefficiency of the newspaper press at that time. Again, the memoirs and personal narratives of Holt, Teeling, Sampson, Hay, and a variety of other publications, of different degrees of merit, contain the richest materials for picturesque and effective history. To these is now added the Autobiography of Archibald Hamilton Rowan, a man whose residence among us helped, for many years, to keep alive in our daily thoughts the memory of the contest in which he had been engaged. Dwelling among us in security and respect, his manly presence was an unceasing testimony to the worth of those of whom he was almost the sole survivor; like a solitary oak still growing where once a forest had been, not the grandest perhaps,

or firmest of that giant race, but still a noble tree, which the storm that levelled all else had somehow passed over and spared.

There is no sort of reading more universally popular than biography; and autobiography is surely not its least attractive species. It is most desirable that many autobiographies should be written, and we hope, as the tide of literature spreads and deepens, to see their number greatly increased, anticipating as we do a corresponding improvement in quality. For as yet it is an ugly fact in literary history, that too many of the best autobiographies are the work of men who ought never to have undertaken such a task. There is a self-respect that genius of the highest order owes unto itself, which we cannot but conceive to be violated by disclosures of a certain kind. Not that dignity is a thing for high or low to stand on thorns about, if they knew but all: walking on stilts is at best a tiresome exercise, and only rational or pardonable in very marshy districts. Nevertheless there are matters, and those unworthy of the slight the world is prone to cast on them, concerning which a man whom fate hath led, scarred perhaps, but still victorious, through the ordeal and fiery whirlwind of contending thought and passion, ought to have respect unto himself, and-simply hold his tongue about them.

We cannot help thinking that such men as Rousseau and Goethe, have, all things considered, done the world more harm than good, by the minute analysis of their early history, which they have bequeathed to after generations. It is, in some respects, an unclean and unwholesome thing to see a man of such an order, a born king of men, a ruler by right divine over the hearts and souls of his generation, or many generations, severing with chirurgic coolness the tissues of his dead departed affections, the truest glories of his life. It chills the pulse of honest enthusiasm, to listen to a patriarch of sorrow