How far is a teacher to be influenced in his selection of books for students by their lines of taste? That depends on how far the tastes of readers in general indicate that books of their liking are to be classed as books of power, as real literature. It is rash to say that a book has real merit because it becomes the best seller of a season; nor is it to be condemned for the very reason that it is a best seller. However, the general praise of a hundred thousand readers is not so much an index to the book's merit as the book is an index to the character of the readers who praise it. Unqualified laudation of a new book, especially a novel, is an annoying kind of hysteria that has failed to find any other outlet. But the very fact that the book is opportune or spectacular carries it along. It grows up and flourishes in a day, and in a day dies out. It is curious to note how times change in the reading world and with them lines of taste. To-day the line most evident in the American reading public, and the one most difficult to meet in the development of a taste for good books, is the passion to be up-to-date, as its commercial phraseology would have it. It is awakened by that wonderful agent, the advertising appeal, that deals not with quality but with quantity. In books it calls for a story, and that story must be the latest or it is certain to be absolutely neglected. On being asked what dish he preferred at a dinner, Thoreau said, "The nearest." That was in keeping with his theory of cutting down the denominator; the theory of the reader of the latest is one of multiplying the numerator. As the proper thing, each new book is taken, horns, hide, and tallow. The reader's reverence for the present grows apace, and he no longer has use for old wine, old friends, and old books. This is a reflection of a widespread impression in American life that up to the present time but little truth of substantial value as to methods of living and thinking has been found out. A wonderful industrial progress, working through inventive skill, has given the notion that anything over a generation old is scarcely worth a passing notice, a notion fatal to all art. Every one must seize in a hurry the newest thing in the market, lest he be branded as out of date. And it all looks as if everybody was trying to do what Alice found them trying to do in Wonderland, running as fast as they could to keep where they were.