The Polytechnic College of Philadelphia, now in its ninth year, is a truly excellent institution, the practical results of which are shown in the fact that its students, immediately on graduating, have generally received appointments as civil and mechanical engineers, or otherwise stepped at once into active and remunerative employment.  Its object, as we are told, is to afford to the young civil, mining, or mechanical engineer, chemist, architect, metallurgist, or student of applied science, every facility whereby he may perfect himself in his destined calling.  It is, in fact, a collection of technical schools, or schools of instruction in the several departments of learned industry.  It comprises the school of mines, for professional training in mine-engineering, in the best methods of determining the value of mineral lands and of analyzing and manufacturing mine products.  Also the schools of civil engineering, of practical chemistry, of mechanical engineering, architecture, general science, and agriculture.  To these is added a military department, now under superintendence of a former instructor in West-Point, with the use of the State armory near the college, generously granted by the State, with a supply of arms.  We are glad to say that in all these schools the instruction is thorough, not only in theory but in actual practice.  The course of the school of chemistry, for instance, comprehends the principles of the science and their actual application to agriculture, to the arts, and to analysis; to the examination and smelting of ores; to the alloying, refining, and working of metals; to the arts of dyeing and pottery; to the starch, lime, and glass manufacture; to the preparation and durability of mortars and cements; to means of disinfecting, ventilating, heating, and lighting.  Its students are also practiced in manipulations, testing in the arts qualitative and quantitative; in analysis of minerals and soils, and in many other important practical matters.

The students of geology and mining, of machinery and metallurgy, make, with their professors, frequent visits to the many interesting localities in Pennsylvania or New-Jersey, to the many large machine-shops with which Philadelphia abounds, visit mines and furnaces, and are in every way practically familiarized with their future callings.  Instruction in languages and literature, in drawing and in the elements of practical law is, we believe, given in common to all.  It is the first, we may say, unavoidable, characteristic of a scientific school, that its work is always well done.  Other schools may or may not be specious contrivances, well or ill managed; but the very nature of science is to clear itself in whatever it touches, and be honest and practical.  Its tendency is to classify and select, to cast away the obsolete and test and adopt the new and true.  Such is by no means an exaggerated statement of the real condition of the excellent college to which we refer, which testifies, by its success, to the excellence of its plan and the competency of its teachers, especially to the administrative ability of its worthy President, Dr. Alfred L. Kennedy.