The tabulated list of universities, colleges and schools of technology in the United States, numbering 578, is an interesting study. A group of ten of the most familiar, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Cornell, represent a property valuation of $187,156,373, with 35,430 students; volumes in libraries, 3,474,641. There are others in the list of the 578 that exceed in number of students and property value several of the ten referred to. Not included in this list is the Carnegie Institute at Washington, D.C., founded to promote original research, the State Normal Schools, and the many educational institutions in large cities, like Cooper Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, the numerous large public libraries furnishing opportunities free for classical education and scientific research. The aggregate shows a power for education of hopeful promise for the future of the country.

Reference has been made to the local advance in the interest of public education from the old stone schoolhouse on the green with its limited facilities to the present large and commodious buildings, thoroughly furnished in all branches from kindergarten to academic. It may be an overstrained illustration of the general advance of public education throughout the country, but wherever we travel, particularly in the far West, the one thing that looms up in town and city is the fine public school building.

The Old Kings College (called Columbia after the Revolutionary War) as I remember it standing on College Place near Murray Street, a plain stone building with fair green campus and good outlook over the North River, where Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and many other leading patriots were educated, presented a wide contrast to the present Columbia University to which it has grown, with its magnificent buildings. Its up-to-date apparatus for scientific study, a library of 450,000 volumes, 604 instructors and 5,195 students is a great advance within a single memory of this one institution, and yet in looking over the many universities and colleges of high order and equipment, scattered all over the country, many of them located in States only one-third the age of this college, it may fairly be regarded as not a forced exponent of the increase and development of colleges in the United States.

In addition to the above is the Press with its enormous issue in our own country. As to books, a quotation from Ecclesiastics fits, "Of making many books, there is no end." The government Bureau of Statistics in its report ending June 30th, 1907, gives the money value of books exported as $5,813,107. The daily newspaper that gives us yesterday's news of the world before breakfast, and the great list of magazines and periodicals with pictorial illustrations (many of which in earlier days would have graced our parlor walls) have a mighty educational power, and if this power were always as good as it is mighty, it would be an inestimable boon for the world.

The editor of the Boston Globe recently furnished some statistics on the growth of American journalism: "In 1810 the total of all kinds of newspapers was 366. The latest available figures show that in 1907 there were 21,535 newspapers, reviews and such. This almost fabulous increase in the number of papers published has been accompanied by a still greater increase in the number of copies issued by each paper. The combined circulation of the press of the United States for 1907 could not have been less than ten billions of copies." These figures are startling as I recall the little package of a half dozen daily papers that used to be left by the evening stage from Newark at my father's store to be called for by the few subscribers of the town. The Newark Sentinel of Freedom, a weekly, had a more extended circulation through the farming district.

This is but a brief record of educational facilities; and beyond this is the large amount of money that is still being gratuitously advanced to further the opportunities for learning. One of the daily papers recently stated that "the aggregate of Andrew Carnegie's gifts for this one purpose during the course of years was $111,000,000." Such facilities at the service of the inquiring mind of the average American give a healthy outlook for an enlightened nation.