Many years ago I proposed to my friend Mr. Quick to rewrite his Educational Reformers, making some additions (Sturm and Froebel, for example), and allow me to place it in this series of educational works. I had read his essays when they first appeared, and noted their great value as a contribution to the right kind of educational literature. They showed admirable tact in the selection of the materials; the “epoch-making” writers were chosen and the things that had been said and done of permanent value were brought forward. Better than all was the running commentary on these materials by Mr. Quick himself. His style was popular, taking the reader, as it were, into confidential relations with him from the start, and offering now and then a word of criticism in the most judicial spirit, leaning neither to the extreme of destructive radicalism, which seeks revolution rather than reform, nor, on the other hand, to the extreme of blind conservatism, which wishes to preserve the vesture of the past rather than its wisdom. I have called this book of Mr. Quick the most valuable history of education in our mother-tongue, fit only to be compared with Karl von Raumer’s Geschichte der Pädagogik for its presentation of essentials and for the sanity of its verdicts. I made my proposal that he “rewrite” his book because I knew that he considered his first edition hastily written and, in many respects, not adequate to the ideal he had conceived of the book. I knew, moreover, that years of continued thinking on a theme necessarily modifies one’s views. He would wish to make some changes in matter presented, some in judgments rendered, and many more in style of presentation. Hence it has come about that after this lapse of time Mr. Quick has produced a substantially new book, which, retaining all or nearly all of the admirable features of the first edition, has brought up to their standard of excellence many others. The history of education is a vast field, and we are accustomed to demand bulky treatises as the only adequate ones. But the obvious disadvantage of such works has led to the clearly defined ideal of a book like Mr. Quick’s, which separates the gold from the dross, and offers it small in bulk but precious in value.