Deep down, however, in the modern woman's nature lies the old instinct for order, for caring for things animate and inanimate. This instinct has found expression since the early seventies among more fortunately situated women in an endeavour to arrest the decay of what I have called the more intimate household arts, to promote their revival and to raise their status in education--an endeavour due, shall we say, to "something in the air," a kind of "Zeit Geist"--beginning more or less contemporaneously on the Continent of Europe, in Great Britain, and in the United States and Canada; an endeavour not to benefit themselves alone, but to help their poorer sisters. It was soon agreed that the cultivation of the household arts belonged to education, and that they might and should be taught in schools; but the questions--What was their link with general education, by what methods they could be most appropriately taught, and in the curriculum of what schools they should find a place--have been the basis of prolonged experimental effort. It is now the opinion of a large section of persons of authority in education, that these arts are neither "sacred mysteries which can only be understood by patient life study," nor, on the other hand, can any woman, whatever her intellectual ability, master them without training. It has been well said, in effect, that the former attitude leads to a contempt for the plain everyday things of life, while the latter is responsible for the cultivation of a girl's head at the expense of her hands. The arts of cooking and cleaning took the lead in order of experiment. The results, as recorded, have proved their position to belong directly to the region of applied science, and to be worthy of a place in a specially arranged course of household science and economics for women, of university standard. We may confidently expect that this result only anticipates a corresponding triumph, awaiting in its turn similar experimental work, which has been carried on for some years in respect of the teaching also of the art of needlework. These experimental efforts include the intelligent employment of the pencil, the scissors, and the needle in the production of garments, draperies, napery, and so forth. The lines along which at the present moment this development is proceeding have regard indeed not only to the practical worth of needlecraft, but to its intimate association with general education as well as to decorative and applied art.