More humble in their first stages, but scarcely inferior as to practical results, are the Swiss straw-platting schools. These have succeeded, in a few years, in developing a veritable new industry, commanding markets in the utmost corners of the earth. Some of the poorest portions of the sub-Alpine districts have become well-to-do and flourishing, and at least one little hamlet, not to be found in the guide-books a few years ago, is now from this trade a thrifty town of some ten thousand inhabitants. The higher instruction in this particular industry extends to the cultivation and acclimatization of various kinds of foreign grasses, furnishing from the coarsest to the finest qualities of straw. In the mountain districts there are schools for teaching the manufacture of children’s toys, for which the Swiss pine is admirably adapted. Then, in those sections where osiers (a species of willow) can be cultivated, establishments for learning basket-making have been started. In Zurich there is a “Dressmakers’ Institute,” from which annually “graduate” thirty to forty _Couturières Parisiennes_. At Winterthur there is a shoemakers’ school, with a peripatetic staff of professors who give lessons wherever a class may be formed. This school also issues publications relating to its aims, one of the latest being quite an exhaustive and scientific treatise on the structure of the human foot, and giving the technical side of the new government regulations concerning the manufacture of army boots and shoes.