In this connection some startling facts have been brought forward by Dr. Leonard P. Ayres in the investigations conducted by him for the Russell Sage Foundation. He tried to find the ages of all the women who are following seven selected occupations in cities of the United States of over 50,000 population. The occupations chosen were those in which the number of women workers exceeds one for every thousand of the population. The number of women covered was 857,743, and is just half of all the women engaged in gainful employment in those cities. The seven occupations listed are housekeeper, nursemaid, laundress, saleswoman, teacher, dressmaker and servant. No less than forty-four per cent. of the housekeepers are between twenty-five and forty-four. Of dressmakers there are fifty-one per cent. between these two ages; of teachers fifty-eight per cent.; of laundresses forty-nine per cent., while the one occupation of which a little more than half are under twenty-five years is that of saleswoman, and even here there are barely sixty-one per cent., leaving the still considerable proportion of thirty-nine per cent. of saleswomen over the age of twenty-five. It is pretty certain that these mature women have given more than the favorite seven years to their trade. It is to be regretted that the investigation was not made on lines which would have included some of the factory occupations. It is difficult to see why it did not. Under any broad classification there must be more garment-workers, for instance, in New York or Chicago, than there are teachers. However, we have reason to be grateful for the fine piece of work which Dr. Ayres has done here. The _Survey_, in an editorial, also quotes in refutation of the seven-year theory, the findings of the commission which inquired into the pay of teachers in New York. The commissioners found that forty-four per cent. of the women teachers in the public schools had been in the service for ten years or more, and that only twenty-five per cent. of the men teachers had served as long a term. It can hardly be doubted that the tendency is towards the lengthening of the wage-earning life of the working-woman. A number of factors affect the situation, about most of which we have as yet little definite information. There is first, the gradual passing of the household industries out of the home. Those women, for whom the opportunity to be thus employed no longer is open, tend to take up or to remain longer in wage-earning occupations.