It can easily be imagined how the clangor of railway construction echoed in the minds and hearts of intending settlers. That they should have watched, with greedy eye, the reports of progress of the location of the road and hurried away to the land office as soon as it was definitely located, to buy the good lands adjacent to the right-of-way, is a perfectly normal phenomenon. The township plats showing original purchasers of the government land tell the story. In section 1, township 7-1 W, four forty-acre tracts were bought in 1854; eleven in 1855; and one in 1856. In section 2, one in 1854; twelve in 1855; and two in 1857. A single forty had been bought as early as 1847. The other sections of that township show very similar dates and proportions in the entries; the same is true of the other townships of the group. The 1854 entrymen were those who pursued the railway surveyors with keenest determination. The slower ones came mainly in the two years following, during which trains actually were put on the roadbed. In October, 1856, the village of Muscoda, which had maintained a precarious existence for twenty years, awoke to newness of life at the sound of the puffing locomotive. And the beginning of permanent prosperity for the village meant the beginning of prosperity for the rural neighborhood tributary to it. POPULAR CENSORSHIP OF HISTORY TEXTS JOSEPH SCHAFER Wisconsin has now a unique law on the subject of school history texts. That law provides, section 1: No history or other textbook shall be adopted for use or be in any district school, city school, vocational school or high school which falsifies the facts regarding the War of Independence or the War of 1812 or which defames our nation’s founders or misrepresents the ideals and cause for which they struggled and sacrificed, or which contains propaganda favorable to any foreign government. The method provided in other sections of the law for banishing textbooks which have been adopted but which are repugnant to the above provision is as follows: Upon complaint of any five citizens, filed with the state superintendent of public instruction, a hearing shall be arranged, to be held before the state superintendent or his deputy, in the county from which the complaint came. Previous notice must have been given through the press to the public and by mail to the complainants and to the publishers of the textbook complained of. A decision must be rendered within ten days. If the book shall be found obnoxious to the provisions of the law, that fact shall be noted by the state superintendent in the list of books for schools which he publishes annually. Thereafter the book so listed may be used only during the remainder of the year in which the state superintendent publishes it as proscribed. The penalty for retaining it beyond the time limit, shall be the loss to the school or district concerned of the state aid normally falling to its share.