powerful influence in forming the early character of the country. In the laws requiring the establishment of common schools lies the secret of the success and character of New England. Every child, as it was born into the world, was lifted from the earth by the genius of its country, and, in the statutes of the land, received as its birthright a pledge of the public care for its morals and its mind.” And as it began, so has it continued; and New England to this day is the seat of the intellectual strength of the New World, and from New England proceed over all the Union teachers, both men and women, of the highest character. The first printing-press in Massachusetts arrived in 1638. It was purchased in England by Jesse Glover, a worthy nonconformist minister, who was about to emigrate with his family, but who unfortunately died on the passage. The press was welcome in the colony, and was worked by Stephen Daye, the printer whom Glover had engaged and taken out with him. It began to work in January, 1639, and it is characteristic of the colony that the first works which it produced, were the Freeman Oath and a metrical version of the Psalms. The first newspaper was published upwards of half a century later. In 1641, the settlements of New Hampshire, on the banks of the Merrimack, feeling themselves in a weak and insecure condition, petitioned the now powerful Massachusetts to take them into its jurisdiction. The general court granted their request, and they became incorporated with that colony. Although we do not hear of Massachusetts exploring beyond her own immediate boundaries, yet this was not wholly the case with regard to New Hampshire and Maine. In 1642, Darby Field, an Irishman, with two Indian guides, penetrated as far as the White Mountains, the glistening peaks of which had long been the landmark of the mariner. And Thomas Gorges, the governor of Maine, the same year, with an exploring party, paddled up the Saco, in birch-bark canoes, to the same remarkable mountains, and ascending their summits, beheld the sources of the Connecticut, the Andrascoggen, the Merrimack, and the Saco rivers. The colony of Connecticut, which was not included in the Massachusetts States Union, continued to increase. The town of Southampton, on Long Island, acknowledged her jurisdiction, as did also Fort Saybrooke, which had been an independent colony until 1643, when Fenwick, who purchased the grant from the original patentees, returning to England, where he entered the parliamentary army, sold his interest in it to Connecticut.