In 1850 the total attendance on colleges in the United States was about ten thousand. Half a century later, when the population of the country had increased about three and one-third times, the college students had increased in a tenfold ratio, or more than three times as rapidly as the population. Even more significant is the growth of the number of college students in more recent years. Since 1889 the number has more than doubled, thus continuing in the latest years a ratio of growth with reference to population quite as great as in earlier years. An equally significant, and quite as conspicuous change, is seen in the growth of technical education. Thirty years ago, when I came to Wisconsin, the university was graduating from two or three and a half dozen engineers yearly, and these could not all find occupation in this commonwealth, with a population then of more than a million people. Now a hundred graduates go out at Commencement, while the population of the state has little more than doubled, and while other engineering schools of high rank have multiplied all around it. Nowadays the man of books, rather than the man of tradition is directing the work of the world. In the copper mines of the north the old-fashioned mine captain, who received his profession and his traditions from his father, is disappearing and has almost vanished. His place is taken by the graduate of a mining school, who interprets what he sees, not by the light of the experience of his elders, communicated to him orally, but by the far clearer light of the collective experience of men embodied in books. When the capitalist now desires to explore for new iron mines he employs not the old-fashioned prospector, but puts into the field a party of young men often fresh from the geological laboratory. Thus science, organized knowledge, book learning, is driving out with increasing rapidity the picturesque figures of past times--times wholly past, though only just behind us in years. That "bookish theoric," so detested by Iago, is apparently firmly in control of affairs and has displaced its predecessors and rivals.