During my education I had noticed again and again with surprise that mathematics took no part in it. Not once had I heard the subject mentioned by any of my guides or companions. I remembered the important place it held in Western curriculums, and wondered how the various scientific families could manage their abstruse formulæ and calculations without that science. A people that laid so much stress on exactitude of research as an essential of all scientific progress were surely lax to a degree in failing to train their youth in the various branches of mathematics. On having my senses tested by the airolan, the thought came uppermost in my mind again; and my proparents at last took notice of it, perhaps as the time had arrived for enlightening me on the subject. They led me to a vast museum-like building, crammed with all kinds of small and intricate machines, not unlike a kind of patent office, where the models of new inventions are deposited for examination and comparison. There was evident in the arrangement a careful classification according to elaboration and delicacy. In the first section we entered there were the simplest of machines, having a few levers and cog-wheels, and a few keys set in a key-board; these were meant for the easier rules of calculation,--addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. We tested most of them and I saw that they were infallibly accurate; never once even in the longest and most intricate calculation was there any error. In fact, these machines had been first invented to avoid the constant errors that vitiated important results when novices were set to work them out. It was then found that not only did they rid calculations of fallibility and the youth of heartless drudgery, but they enabled the race to advance more rapidly. They set free years of life, especially in the formative stage, that had been wasted on mere routine and mechanical work; and, best of all, they allowed the tissues of young brains to be less rigid. It was noted that, after the calculating machines were set to work, the youth grew in mental and especially in imaginative power at twice the old rate. The elders of the state were amazed at the result, prizing as they had done the effect of arithmetic in the discipline and education of the young; indeed, it had been with great regret that they saw the youth relieved of so disciplinary an exercise; and they even thought of making an exception to their usual utilitarian state-principle, and training the boys and girls in rapid calculation, although it would be of so little use to them in their after-lives. But a few years convinced them of the serious mistake they had made. The pace of development so suddenly and greatly quickened in the new generation that the result could be set down to nothing else than the new freedom from calculations. Their own faculties and imagination seemed stiff and almost ossified compared to the ease and flexibility of those of their sons and daughters.