First consider the lengthening of the school period for children. I do not think it is possible accurately to compare the present length of this period with that which existed a century or a half ago; nor would such a comparison interest us. It is enough for our purpose to know that years have been added to the school life of many thousands of the youth of all classes. As a single illustration, consider the effect of the high school, whose development into a large and popular institution, an institution affecting great masses of the people, belongs almost wholly to the period within the life of the generation now on the stage. A half century ago the public high school was almost unknown and the private academy reached very few persons. Only a generation ago the number of students in secondary schools was hardly one-tenth of the present number. The attendance on institutions of secondary grade has thus increased five times as rapidly as the population. Within the past fifteen years the attendance in the high schools of Milwaukee has more than trebled, while only a little more than fifty per cent. has been added to the population of the city. In Racine almost exactly the same ratio holds, and so for many other cities of the United States, the increase being least marked in New England cities, and greatest in the cities of the West. The formative influence of the high school youth are far more extensively and exclusively books than were those of his father or grandfather, who probably began to learn his trade, or his business, at about the age when his boy enters the high school, and who therefore, during the period of adolescence, received his training from action rather than from study, from oral rather than from printed experience. One may find to-day in the writings of many teachers jeremiads over the shortness of the average school life of children. I would not contradict their statistics and would join in their regrets, but the fact remains that the most striking phenomenon in the life of the children of the past thirty years is the extent to which their training has been committed to the use of books and the rapid growth of the use of books as the period has advanced. Few as the school years of the children now are, those of any older generation have been fewer. This aspect of the matter is the one that is of interest to us, and the school life of the present, instead of arousing our regrets by its brevity, may well call out our astonishment by its length, and demand the use of our best wits to see the changes which have been caused in the life of the present and to forecast those which in the future will flow from this fundamental change in education. One of these correlated changes is already apparent--the extension of the period of book learning for many thousands of persons into the college and university course.