re making.

Our schools can and will advance much further in personnel, methods and
results; but they are by no means on the downward path now. One way in
which they may do better work is by greater appreciation of their
selective as well as their training function.

Suppose we have twenty bushels of raspberries and the same quantity of
potatoes to be prepared for food. Our present educational methods are a
good deal like those of a cook who should try to make the whole into
either jam or Saratoga chips, or should divide the lot in some arbitrary
way unrelated to their fitness for one or the other operation. We are
giving in our educational institutions many degrees and many kinds of
training without proper selection of the persons to whom the training is
to be applied. Selection must be and is made, of course, but it is made on
arbitrary lines, or for reasons unrelated to fitness. One boy's education
lasts ten years, and another's two, not because the former is fitted to
profit by a longer period of training, but because his father happens to
have money and inclination to give it to him. One young man studies
medicine and another goes into business, not because these are the careers
for which they are specially fitted, but because one thinks that the
prefix "Doctor" would look well in front of his name and the other has a
maternal uncle in the dry-goods trade.

I am not so foolish as to think that selection of this kind could ever be
made with unerring accuracy, but I do assert that an effort should be made
to effect it in a greater degree through our regular educational
institutions and to leave it less to chance. Our present methods are like
those of wild nature, which scatters seeds broadcast in the hope that some
may settle on favoring soil, rather than those of the skilled cultivator,
who sees that seed and soil are fitted for each other.

In this and other particulars I look for great improvement in our
educational methods; but I do not think that, except in local and
unessential particulars, here and there, they are now retrograding.

SOME ECONOMIC FEATURES OF LIBRARIES[4]

[4] Read at the opening of the Chestnut Hill Branch, Philadelphia
Free Library, January 22, 1909.

Of the three great divisions of economics--production, distribution and
consumption--the library has to do chiefly with the second, and it is as a
distributor of literature that I desire to speak of it, although it has