There is no essential difference between the forced promotion of such pupils and the breeding of super-men according to Nietzsche's recipe as exemplified by his Zarathustra. Assuming that super-men are justified in existing at all, they will come about of themselves, but cannot simply be manufactured. Workmen, taken as a class, represent super-men more definitely than an individual such as Napoleon or Cæsar Borgia. So the "super-scholar" exists perhaps already to-day, not as an individual phenomenon, but as a whole, representing his class. Whoever has had experience in these things will know that nowadays there are difficult subjects in which it is possible to apply to pupils of fifteen years of age tests that are far above the plane of comprehension of pupils of the same age in former times, provided that the average is considered, that no accidental or artificial separation has occurred, that no pretentiously witty questions have had to be answered, and that there has been no systematic and inquisitive search for talent. Let us rest satisfied if we find that the sum-total of talent is continually on the increase. On the other hand, it is by no means proved that we are doing civilization a service by persisting in the impossible project of abolishing from the world the struggle for existence prescribed by Nature. It is an elementary fact, and one that is easy to understand, that many talents perish unnoticed. On the other hand, observe the long list of eminent men who fought their way upwards out of the lowest stages of existence only to recognize that the difficulties that have been overcome are mostly necessary accompaniments of talent, that is, that Nature's way of selection is to oppose obstacles and raise difficulties in order to test their powers. In the case of the poor lens-grinder Spinoza and many others ranging to Béranger, who was a waiter, what a chain of desperate experiences, yet what triumphs! Herschel, the astronomer, was too poor to buy a refracting telescope, and it was just this dispensation of poverty that made him succeed in constructing a reflecting type composed of a mirror. Faraday, the son of a blacksmith without means, made his way for years as a bookbinder's apprentice. Joule, one of the founders of the mechanical theory of heat, started as a beer-brewer. Kepler, the discoverer of the planetary laws, was descended from a poverty-stricken innkeeper. Of the members in Goethe's circle, Jung-Stilling, of whom Nietzsche was so fond, was a tailor's apprentice; Eckermann, Goethe's intimate associate, was a swine-herd, and Zelter was a mason. We could add many recent names to this list, and very many more if we continue the line backwards to Euripides, whose father was a publican and whose mother was a vendor of vegetables. This might serve as a basis for many reflections about the "upward course of the talented," and about its less favourable reverse side. For one might put the apparently paradoxical question whether a