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422 ing any subject in a simple and intelligent manner, a thing most valuable for instructors in lower classes. Their conversations throughout a great part of the day are to be carried on in Latin. Besides, there are several hours a week devoted to regular schools in Latin, Greek, and the mother tongue; thus the knowledge of languages is at least kept alive, if not perfected.

After the two years novitiate, the young Jesuits have to repeat the classical studies for one, two or three years – the time varies according to the studies made previous to admission to the Society. Special attention is paid to the precepts of aesthetics, poetics, and rhetoric, and to various practical applications of these precepts. Then follows a three years' course of philosophy, mathematics and natural sciences, especially physics, chemistry, biology, physiology, astronomy and geology. The system pursued is entirely different from that followed at our universities, where the student listens to the lectures of the professor, takes down notes and studies them at home, and then goes up for examination at the end of the year. Not so with the Jesuits. The lectures of the professor are not the only, perhaps not even the most important part in the philosophical and scientific training. Characteristic and most essential are again the exercises, foremost among them the disputations, for which three or four times a week a full hour is set apart. In what do they consist? One of the students has to study carefully a thesis previously treated in the lectures, in order to expound and defend it against the objections which are being prepared in the meantime by two other students. On the appointed day the