The modern elementary vernacular school may then be said to be essentially a product of the Protestant Reformation. This is true in a special sense among those peoples which embraced some form of the Lutheran or Calvinistic faiths. These were the Germans, Moravians, Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Dutch, Walloons, Swiss, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, French Huguenots, and the English Puritans. As the Renaissance gave a new emphasis to the development of secondary schools by supplying them with a large amount of new subject-matter and a new motive, so the Reformation movement gave a new motive for the education of children not intended for the service of the State or the Church, and the development of elementary vernacular schools was the result. Only in England, of all the revolting countries, did this Protestant conception as to the necessity of education for salvation fail to take deep root, with the result that elementary education in England awaited the new political and social and industrial impulses of the latter half of the nineteenth century for its real development. The rise of the questioning and inferring spirit in the Italian Renaissance marked the beginnings of the transition from mediaeval to modern attitudes, and one of the most important outgrowths of this was the rise of scientific inquiry which in time followed. This meant the application of human reason to the investigation of the phenomena of nature, with all that this eventually implied. This, slowly to be sure, turned the energies of mankind in a new direction, led to the substitution of inquiry and patient experimentation for assumption and disputation, and in time produced a scientific and industrial revolution which has changed the whole nature of the older problems. The scientific spirit has to-day come to dominate all lines of human thinking, and the applications of scientific principles have, in the past century, completely changed almost all the conditions surrounding human life. Applied to education, this new spirit has transformed the instruction and the methods of the schools, led to the creation of entirely new types of educational institutions, and introduced entirely new aims and methods and purposes into the educational process.