The normal class was another of the steps toward co-education. In the middle of this century it was not uncommon for special short terms of instruction for teachers to be held during the fall or spring vacations of the common schools. To secure the advantage of good lecture rooms and appliances, and also to secure the aid of distinguished professors, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction would obtain permission to hold his normal class at the State university; or for similar reasons a county Superintendent would hold such a school for the teachers within his jurisdiction, in a college town. In these “normal schools,” having no formal or permanent relation with the college at which they were held, one sees the origin in many colleges of their present “departments of the theory and practice of elementary instruction.” From the earliest settlement of the West women taught the district schools in the summer, and the work of elementary instruction fell naturally more and more into their hands, until it was, during the war of 1861–5, almost monopolized by them. Necessarily, when the “normal classes” were organized, women entered and sometimes exclusively composed them. After the normal class had transcended its original limits of four or six weeks, and had developed into a “normal department,” women still, in part or in whole, constituted it. Lectures were always being delivered in other departments of the college which would be beneficial to the students in the normal department, whose members were, therefore, gradually admitted to one privilege after another, until at last the college awakened to a consciousness that it had no reserves. More State universities than denominational colleges have been entered by women _viâ_ the “normal class,” though many of the latter have been opened by the same insidious influence. So far as the State university was concerned, the end must have been seen from the beginning by all clear-sighted people. The State university, like the common school, is supported at public expense, and free to the children of the State, who pass into it from the common school. What more natural indeed, more necessary, than that the teachers who are to prepare the boys for the university shall know, by their own experience in it as students, what the requirements of the university are? In illustration of this view, the steps by which co-education was attained in the universities of Wisconsin and Missouri are briefly indicated. In the spring of 1860 a ten weeks’ course of lectures was given at the University of Wisconsin, to a “normal class” of fifty-nine, of whom thirty were ladies. In the spring of 1863 a “normal department” was opened, which was at once entered by seventy-six ladies. At this time the Regents announced that the lectures in the university proper upon chemistry, geology, botany, mechanical philosophy, and English literature would be free to the “normal” students.