“BE IT KNOWN to you that I have examined Miss Lucinda Foote, twelve years old, and have found that in the learned languages, the Latin and the Greek, she has made commendable progress, giving the true meaning of passages in the Æneid of Virgil, the select orations of Cicero, and in the Greek testament, and that she is fully qualified, except in regard to sex, to be received as a pupil of the Freshman Class of Yale University. “Given in the College Library, the 22d of December, 1783. “EZRA STILES, _President_.” Miss Foote afterwards pursued a full course of college studies and Hebrew, under President Stiles. She then married and had ten children. Timothy Dwight, President of Yale College, traveled in 1803 through New England and New York, and made careful observation of educational conditions. He reports that “of the higher class of schools, generally styled academies, where pupils are qualified for college, there are twenty in Connecticut and forty-eight in Massachusetts.” He adds: “Two of those in Connecticut and three in Massachusetts are exclusively female seminaries. Some others admit children of both sexes.” He does not say that any one of the thirteen in New Hampshire or of the twelve in Vermont was open to girls. A third of a century afterwards Massachusetts had 854 academies and private schools. Later, the advance in grade of the public school system so reduced the number of personally supported schools, that in 1886 there were but 74 academies and 348 private schools, about one-half the number of a century before. The rapid growth and as rapid decline of the academy system was due to the fact that, while personal and associated effort had taken up a work for which the people were not prepared, its success proved a rapid educator, especially as to the capacity of girls, and the free school system was steadily pressed to higher levels. Salem established an English high school for boys in 1827; one for girls eighteen years later, in 1845. It was in 1836, as has been stated, when the school committee of Newburyport decreed “that one female grammar school be kept though the year”; it was only six years afterwards, in 1842, that the town voted to establish a female high school. This was encouraging, but when, later, the valuable “Putnam Fund” came into use for advanced education, there was much discussion between the special committee, appointed by the town, in conference with the trustees of the fund, as to whether Mr. Putnam designed, by his bequest, to include the instruction of females, and it required a decision of the Supreme Court to sustain the position of the trustees that _“youth” might include both sexes_.