He did not consider that ideas of which the germ is sound have, nevertheless, their periods of incubation; but, if shades are permitted to “revisit the glimpses of the moon,” we can imagine the venerable ex-Mayor, ex-President of Harvard, and most worthy man, reflectively regarding the “Girls’ High School,” established in connection with the Normal School in 1852, almost before his words of self-gratulation had ceased to echo; and, with still more astonishment, contemplating the Girls’ Latin School, established in 1878 _to fit girls for college_. In Massachusetts in 1888, 198 cities and towns supported high schools, most of them co-educational. The population of the cities and towns in which these schools are maintained is over ninety-five per cent. of the whole population of the State. It is not to be understood that this marvelous progress had come without resistance at every step, or had been achieved except in the way that a plant with the growing power in it struggles to light from under the pavement. We have seen that in the lower schools when girls, in process of time, came to be taught at all, it was out of fitting season, sometimes out of due hours, without the best instructors, with limited range of study, and always with deference to the superior claim of boys. In the endeavor of girls toward the higher education, one is too sadly reminded of the struggles of the plebeians against the patricians in Rome, when positions wrung from usurping hands, were yielded, only to be, to the uttermost, shorn of advantage. As girls have gained successive opportunities for advanced study, the aim of the opponents has always been to keep those only analogous to, not identical with, those of boys. They have, therefore, been steadily weighted with limiting conditions, as the educational history of Boston serves to illustrate. We have seen that the experimental high school of 1825 was, in its feebleness, hampered by, if, indeed, it was not founded for the trial of the monitorial system, and was moribund from its inception. When, a quarter of a century later, the demand for better education for girls again took form, those most active thought it discreet to avoid the controversy of the past, and, as a more feasible measure, a Normal School for teachers was projected, and was established in 1852.