orts
made by legislatures on behalf of good public school systems. In the
period of 1840-50 Horace Mann revived the New England interest in
education and laid the foundations for the school systems of to-day.
Even so ardent a Southerner as William L. Yancey, of Alabama, became a
disciple of the New England reformer, and tried to do a similar work in
his State. In Indiana, Illinois, and the other Western States
educational reforms followed. There were in consequence about 5,000,000
children in school in the year 1860. Of these the South had 796,000, the
Northwest, exclusive of California, 2,005,196, and the East, 2,011,826;
which shows that Southern public opinion had not yet been aroused to
the importance of the subject. But the figures for illiteracy, already
given, do not show a worse condition among the whites of the South than
is shown in the Northwestern States.

If the returns for college education be taken, the balance among the
sections is fairly reestablished. There were 25,882 college students in
the South in 1860, and this does not take into account the large number
of Southern students in Eastern institutions like Princeton and Harvard.
There were at the same time 16,959 college students in the Northwest,
and 10,449 in the East.

Between education and the attainments of science and invention there is
some connection, though genius often defies all conventional methods of
instruction. In addition to the epoch-making inventions of McCormick and
his competitors, Samuel F. B. Morse had perfected his electric
telegraph, which was in operation in most of the countries of Europe
before 1860. Richard M. Hoe revolutionized newspaper publishing in the
late forties by his rotary printing-press, which put out thousands of
copies of a paper in an hour. Nor was Elias Howe's sewing-machine any
less of a wonder when it came into use about 1850. Draper and Morse's
new photography, Thurber's typewriter, Woodruff's sleeping-car, and many
other marvelous contrivances of the same period showed the fertility of
the American inventive genius.

In scientific research the United States could not present so many
evidences of her success, though in 1860 Alexander Dallas Bache, the
head of the Coast Survey, was counted one of the leading scientists of
his time, and Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-American naturalist, was teaching
now in Charleston, now in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, and
beginning the great work, _Contributio