Adams’ Arithmetic, which I have shown you, you observe was covered with leather pasted over a very thin pasteboard. It had no headbands, and its sheets were stitched by hand. Leather binding on the larger books, Dr. Vail tells us, persisted for a number of years after the beginning of the nineteenth century. This gentleman informs us that the First Reader of the original McGuffey series made a thin 18mo book of 72 pages, having green paper covered sides. Peter Parley’s _Method of Telling About Geography_, published in 1829, was a thin, square little book with leather back and flexible pasteboard sides. His _National Geography_, published in 1845, was the earliest to take the large, flat quarto shape. This form enabled it to include good-sized maps and do away with the necessity for a separate atlas. Cover designs were not used until quite late in the nineteenth century, and of course books whose covers bore no designs of any sort were far less attractive than those bound to-day. In 1874, under the direction of Mr. James McNally, of Rand McNally & Company, that concern began the publication of atlases, pocket and large wall maps. In 1872, the Company had introduced the then new relief line engraving process for making maps--a process which revolutionized the methods of that day and cut the cost of production by several hundred per cent. Maps that can now be bought for from 25 cents to $1.00 each used to cost, under the old method of map making, all the way from $5.00 to $10.00 apiece. The modern map, well and thoroughly made, records faithfully every fact concerning the surface of the earth now known to man, and there is very little about it that scholarly geographers do not now know. In addition to the modern map’s accuracy, it is as much more attractive than its forebears to the eye as the beautiful color pictures now used in textbooks are seen to be when compared with the muddy wood cuts that appeared in schoolbooks a century or more ago. It is not necessary for me to speak in such a presence as this of the contents of modern schoolbooks in order to point out how vastly superior in every respect they are to the contents of books of the earlier days. It would be a work of supererogation for me to comment at length, for instance, upon the character of the literature now included in reading books, or to note the scientific work that is now commonly done in the preparation of one of the most difficult books to prepare, namely, the primer, whose text matter and vocabulary are so splendidly adapted to the capacity of the young child, and whose illustrations picture his pets, his toys, his games, his playmates, and other things with which he is thoroughly familiar. I asked a literary friend to pick out a half dozen of the choicest selections of literature that he knew in modern readers. He replied as follows: