The invention of printing made possible the study of geometry in a new fashion. It now became possible for any one to study from a book, whereas before this time instruction was chiefly by word of mouth, consisting of an explanation of Euclid. The first Euclid was printed in 1482, at Venice, and new editions and variations of this text came out frequently in the next century. Practical geometries became very popular, and the reaction against the idea of mental discipline threatened to abolish the old style of text. It was argued that geometry was uninteresting, that it was not sufficient in itself, that boys needed to see the practical uses of the subject, that only those propositions that were capable of application should be retained, that there must be a fusion between the demands of culture and the demands of business, and that every man who stood for mathematical ideals represented an obsolete type. Such writers as Finaeus (1556), Bartoli (1589), Belli (1569), and Cataneo (1567), in the sixteenth century, and Capra (1678), Gargiolli (1655), and many others in the seventeenth century, either directly or inferentially, took this attitude towards the subject,--exactly the attitude that is being taken at the present time by a number of teachers in the United States. As is always the case, to such an extreme did this movement lead that there was a reaction that brought the Euclid type of book again to the front, and it has maintained its prominence even to the present. The study of geometry in the high schools is relatively recent. The Gymnasium (classical school preparatory to the university) at Nuernberg, founded in 1526, and the Cathedral school at Wuerttemberg (as shown by the curriculum of 1556) seem to have had no geometry before 1600, although the Gymnasium at Strassburg included some of this branch of mathematics in 1578, and an elective course in geometry was offered at Zwickau, in Saxony, in 1521. In the seventeenth century geometry is found in a considerable number of secondary schools, as at Coburg (1605), Kurfalz (1615, elective), Erfurt (1643), Gotha (1605), Giessen (1605), and numerous other places in Germany, although it appeared but rarely in the secondary schools of France before the eighteenth century. In Germany the Realschulen--schools with more science and less classics than are found in the Gymnasium--came into being in the eighteenth century, and considerable effort was made to construct a course in geometry that should be more practical than that of the modified Euclid. At the opening of the nineteenth century the Prussian schools were reorganized, and from that time on geometry has had a firm position in the secondary schools of all Germany. In the eighteenth century some excellent textbooks on geometry appeared in France, among the best being that of Legendre (1794), which influenced in such a marked degree the geometries of America. Soon after the opening of the nineteenth century