This American Society comes in as a helpmate to the local centre, the branch, the college, and the university. Its functions are distinct and various. Coming forward with the accumulated experience of a quarter century in England, it can enable extension workers in this country to profit thereby. It has employed a corps of practical business men to systematize the work, and to attend to the necessary details; it is publishing a monthly journal called _University Extension_, for the purpose of gathering and disseminating information regarding the movement; it publishes syllabi and furnishes them to the student and to the public at the lowest possible cost; and employs organizers to help in the formation of local centres, and to get them in working order. It must be recognized at once that no single educational institution can do this general work, and that the American Society, instead of becoming a competitor with the university in extension work, renders it practical for even the smaller colleges to enter this field of usefulness. In the performance of its functions, then, the National Society must ordinarily deal with the greater centres of organization; still when it is impracticable to form a branch, it may deal directly with the local centre. Nor is its influence bounded by any conventional barriers. It can enter the home where the solitary student sits by his evening lamp, and direct his work. In this home work, of course, the student rarely comes into direct contact with the educator, but through systematized correspondence his work may be directed and finally tested. It can thus be given a true educational value. It must not be ignored that a startling proportion of our great business men are what are termed self-educated. So will it be in the future; but it is far from visionary to believe that university extension will open paths whereby the solitary student need no longer employ an expensive tutor nor waste his time, groping in the labyrinth paths of knowledge, without a thread, at least, to direct his wanderings to pleasanter fields of light and learning.