Judging merely from the newspaper accounts of their proceedings, it is almost invariably impossible to discover the exact meaning of anything which is uttered, but this may be due to the absence of the regular reporters on their annual vacations, and the consequent delegation to tyros of the difficult duty in question. But even assuming that the utterances of the summer schools are both intelligible and stimulating, would not the serious-minded men and women concerned in them be better off lying in a hammock under a wide-spreading beech-tree, or, if this seems too relaxing an occupation, watching the bathers at Narragansett Pier? There is wisdom sometimes in sending young and very active boys to school for about an hour a day in summer, in order chiefly to know where they are and to prevent them from running their legs off; but with this exception the mental workers in this country, male and female, young and old, can afford to close their text-books with a bang on July 1st, and not peep at them again until September. Philosophy in August has much the flavor of asparagus in January. The _Case of Man_. I. A not inconsiderable portion of the women of the United States is inclined to regard man as a necessary evil. Their point of view is that he is here, and therefore is likely, for the present at least, to remain a formidable figure in human affairs, but that his ways are not their ways, that they disapprove of them and him, and that they intend to work out their lives and salvation as independently of him as possible. What man in the flush and prime of life has not been made conscious of this attitude of the modern woman? She is constantly passing us in the street with the manner of one haughtily and supremely indifferent. There are women enough still who look patterns of modesty, and yet let us feel at the same time that we are more or less an object of interest to them; but this particular type sails by in her trig and often stylish costume with the air not merely of not seeing us, but of wishing to ignore us. Her compressed lips suggest a judgment; a judgment born of meditated conviction which leaves no hope of reconsideration or exception. “You are all substantially alike,” she seems to say, “and we have had enough of you. Go your ways and we will go ours.” The Mecca of the modern woman’s hopes, as indicated by this point of view, would appear to be the ultimate disappearance of man from the face of the earth after the manner of the mastodon and other brutes. Nor are her hopes balked by physiological barriers. She is prepared to admit that it is not obvious, as yet, how girls alone are to be generated and boy babies given the cold maternal shoulder; but she trusts to science and the long results of time for a victory which will eliminate sexual relations and all their attendant perplexities and tragedies from the theatre of human life.