His mastery of the pencil had undoubtedly a great deal to do in cultivating his powers of inventive imagination. He says:--“It is one of the most delightful results of the possession of the constructive faculty, that one can build up in the mind mechanical structures and set them to work in imagination, and observe beforehand the various details performing their respective functions, as if they were in absolute form and action. Unless this happy faculty exists in the brain of the mechanical engineer, he will have a hard and disappointing life before him. It is the early cultivation of the imagination which gives the right flexibility to the thinking faculty.” Manual Training. Drawing is one of the courses in every manual training school in America. The first of these schools was organized in 1879 St. Louis, under the direction of Professor C. M. Woodward. Within the past thirty years, from the kindergarten to the university, American education has addressed itself as never before to bringing out all the talents of pupils and students. In earlier days there was little appeal to sense perception, to dexterity, to the faculties of eye and hand which all too soon pass out of plasticity, to leave the young man or woman for life destitute of powers which, had they been duly elicited, would have broadened their careers by widening their horizons. To-day, happily, our schools are more and more supplementing literary and mathematical courses with instruction in the use of tools, in modeling, design, and pattern-making. Every process is thoroughly explained. All the studies are linked into series; these unite practice and its reasons with a thoroughness impossible in the outworn schemes of apprenticeship. All this is a distinct aid to inventiveness. As Professor Woodward says in “Manual Training in Education”:--“Manual training cultivates a capacity for executive work, a certain power of creation. Every manual exercise involves the execution of a clearly defined plan. Familiar steps and processes are to be combined with new ones in a rational order and for a definite purpose. As a rule these exercises are carefully chosen by the instructor. At proper times and in reasonable degree, pupils are set to forming and executing their own plans. Here is developed not a single faculty, but a combination of many faculties. Memory, comparison, imagination, and a train of reasoning, all are necessary in creating something new out of the old.” How the Phonograph was Born.