In effect, Einstein declared to me that he would hear nothing of a breeding of talents in a sort of sporting way. The dangers of the methods of sport would creep in and lead to results that had only the appearance of truth. From the results so far obtained it was impossible to come to a final decision about it. Yet it was conceivable that a selective process conducted along reasonable lines would in general prove of advantage in education, particularly in the respect that many a talent that would ordinarily become stunted owing to its being kept in darkness would now have an opportunity of coming to light. This resolved itself into a talk bearing on many questions, and of which I should like to state the main issue here. It was specially intended to make clear the gambling method that Einstein repudiates, and the danger of which seems still more threatening to me than to him. If certain pedagogues, whose creed is force, were to have their way, the "most gifted" pupils would be able, or would be compelled, to rush through school at hurricane speed, and, at an age at which their fellows were still spending weary hours at their desks, they would have to clamber to the topmost branches of the academic tree. All things are possible, and history even furnishes cases of such forced marches. Luther's friend Melanchthon qualified at the age of thirteen to enter the University of Heidelberg, and at the age of seventeen he became a professor at Tübingen, where he gave lectures on the most difficult problems of philosophy, as well on the Roman and Greek writers of classical antiquity. This single instance need only be generalized, and we have the new ideal rising up before our astonished gaze: a race of professorial striplings whose upper lips are scarcely darkened with the down of youth! It is a mere matter of making an early discovery of the most gifted, and then raising the scaffolding up which the precocious know-alls can climb as easily as possible.