r of human beings, as a matter of course, and the study of this
subject is, at once, both alluring and illusive. No sooner has the
student arrived at deductions that seem conclusive than exceptions begin
to loom up on his speculative horizon that disintegrate his theories and
cause him to retrace the steps of his reasoning. Such a study affords
large scope for introspection, but too few people incline to examine
their own behavior in any mental attitude that approaches the
scientific. The others seem to think that things just happen, and that
their own behavior is fortuitous. They seem not to be able to reason
from effect back to cause, or to realize that there may be any possible
connection between what they are doing at the present moment and what
they were doing twenty years ago.

=Environment.=--In what measure is a man the product of his environment?
To what extent is a man able to influence his environment? These
questions start us on a line of inquiry that leads toward the realm of,
at least, a hypothetical solution of the problem of behavior. After we
have reached the conclusion, by means of concrete examples, that many
men have influenced their environment, it becomes pertinent, at once, to
inquire still further whence these men derived the power thus to modify
their environment. We may not be able to reach final or satisfactory
answers to these questions, but it will, none the less, prove a
profitable exercise. We need not trench upon the theological doctrine of
predestination, but we may, with impunity, speculate upon the
possibility of a doctrine of educational predestination.

=Queries.=--Was Mr. George Goethals predestined to become the engineer
of the Panama Canal from the foundation of the world, or might he have
become a farmer, a physician, or a poet? Could Julius Caesar have turned
back from the Rubicon and refrained from saying, "The die is cast"?
Could Abraham Lincoln have withheld his pen from the Emancipation
Proclamation and permitted the negro race to continue in slavery? Could
any influence have deterred Walter Scott from writing "Kenilworth"? Was
Robert Fulton's invention of the steamboat inevitable? Could Christopher
Columbus possibly have done otherwise than discover America? Does
education have anything whatever to do in determining what a man will or
will not do?

=Antecedent causes.=--Here sits a man, let us say, who is writing a
musical selection. He works in a veritable frenzy, and al