he adds that the chief endeavor of his life has been against these tendencies. For the American boy and girl, high school too often means Latin. This gives at first a pleasing sense of exaltation to a higher stage of life, but after from one to three years the great majority who enter the high school drop out limp and discouraged for many reasons, largely, however, because they are not fed. Defective nutrition of the mind also causes a restlessness, which enhances all the influences which make boys and girls leave school. II. The second cause of this degeneration is the subordination of literature and content to language study. Grammar arises in the old age of language. As once applied to our relatively grammarless tongue it always was more or less of a school-made artifact and an alien yoke, and has become increasingly so as English has grown great and free. Its ghost, in the many textbooks devoted to it, lacks just the quality of logic which made and besouled it. Philology, too, with all its magnificence, is not a product of the nascent stages of speech. In the college, which is its stronghold, it has so inspired professors of English that their ideal is to be critical rather than creative till they prefer the minute reading of a few masterpieces to a wide general knowledge, and a typical university announces that "in every case the examiners will treat mere knowledge of books as less important than the ability to write good English" that will parse and that is spelled, punctuated, capitalized, and paragraphed aright. Good professors of English literature are hard to find, and upon them philologists, who are plentiful, look with a certain condescension. Many academic chairs of English are filled by men whose acquaintance of our literature is very narrow, who wish to be linguistic and not literary, and this is true even in ancient tongues. At a brilliant examination, a candidate for the doctor's degree who had answered many questions concerning the forms of Lucretius, when asked whether he was a dramatist, historian, poet, or philosopher, did not know, and his professor deemed the question improper. I visited the eleventh recitation in Othello in a high school class of nineteen pupils, not one of whom knew how the story ended, so intent had they been kept on its verbiage. Hence, too, has come the twelve feet of text-books on English on my shelves with many standard works, edited for schools, with more notes than text. Fashion that works from above down the grades and college entrance requirements are in large measure responsible for this, perhaps now the worst case of the prostitution of content to form.