With many education is looked upon merely as a mental training whose sole object is to place the mind in a state fit to receive future impressions. This may be all very well for those who are never to feel the keen struggle for existence; but for a vast and constantly-increasing majority who are doomed to a bread-winning life, the main purpose of education should be to make the youthful mind “a supple, effective, strong, and available instrument for whatever purpose it may be applied to.” Less than three per cent. of the boys of this country can hope to make a living by the practice of the professions. Less than twenty per cent. of the boys enter high schools, and less than half of those who enter complete the course. The first duty of man is to work, and the first object of education should be to fit him for that work; to make him not the slave but the master of what it has imparted, the manipulator and not the mere receptacle of its power. Every year adds to the necessity of supplementing the muscular power of the laborer and artisan with that mental energy which only comes of education. Men in the busy corners of the globe are multiplying day by day, and multiplying more rapidly than the means of supporting life. Unskilled labor, or, as technically defined, the “labor of quantity,” is being ousted by the iron sinews and fiery pulse of the steam-engine and the machine. Man, as the mere owner of muscle, is being edged out by these most powerful competitors. Merely as an agent of physical force, as the possessor of the power of labor, the steam-engine is a competitor which drives him easily out of the market, and more and more unskilled labor is passing away by the development of the forces which mechanical science has discovered. As the world goes on, we must expect mechanical force to be more varied, more powerful, and cheaper, and the competition of the human limbs to become more helpless. But there is one region where the machine can never follow the human being, and that is in the exercise of thought. In skill, in the cultivation of the mind, in the power of applying the powers of thought to the laws of nature, in all that we call skilled labor of the highest kind, in that man must always have a monopoly and need fear no encroachment. Science teaching, as applied to that instruction which familiarizes the student with the universe in which he lives, and makes him in the presence of the great laws and forces of nature not a stranger, but a child at home, must be recognized as one of the great moulding influences of the time; it is at the foundation of material progress; it is the basis on which much of the manufacturing industry and commerce rests; many of the deep social ameliorations of the day are due to its influence; and popular education must be brought into closer relations with it. The industrial world has been made by scientific discovery, and its prosperity must largely depend on the