Most of the academies, too, which proved such a hindrance to the development of public secondary education, gradually died or were merged in the public system as high schools. By means of state aid, it has been possible since 1903 for the smallest towns to afford a high school training for their children at public expense. Supervision has also become universal during the past quarter century. Springfield first introduced a superintendent of schools in 1841, Gloucester in 1850, Boston in 1851, and the other cities much later, but since 1888, through increasing state aid and the combination of smaller towns into a district superintendency, expert supervision has become possible everywhere, and during the last decade it has been compulsory. The normal schools, which have now increased to ten, have brought about a striking improvement in teaching. It is practically impossible at present for an untrained teacher to secure a position in the elementary schools of Massachusetts, and, through a system of examinations and investigations, teachers of exceptional ability have, since 1896, been granted an extra weekly allowance by the state. Since the middle of the century, the state board has been permitted to appoint a number of agents, to assist in inspecting and improving the schools, especially in the smaller towns and rural districts. [Sidenote: Similar development in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and other New England states.] The course of development since the awakening has been very similar in the other New England states. The successors of Barnard in the central administration both in Rhode Island and Connecticut have been skilled and earnest educators, and, while their reports lacked his literary touch, they were of rather more practical character. Until 1856, Connecticut made no attempt to return from the parish to the town organization. Even then, as well as later, legislation on the subject was ‘permissive,’ and not until the twentieth century was the ‘school society,’ or district system, given up in half of the towns. In Rhode Island, even after Barnard’s reforms, almost one-third of the districts did not own their school buildings, owing to the survival of the method in use when the schools were private, but this condition has gradually been remedied. Likewise, the number of towns levying sufficient local taxes to secure a share in the state apportionment rapidly grew, and the state appropriation itself doubled and quadrupled within a generation. In Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, owing to insufficient wealth, infertility of soil, and sparseness of population, effective public education has been reached only by slow and cautious steps. But even these states have gradually centralized their educational administration through the abolition of the district system and the creation at various times of a state superintendent, a state commissioner, or a state board and secretary. This reorganization has