required for the teachers, and here is created another demand leading to
the preparation of new and improved books by the teachers themselves. The
scholars enter life and next we find numerous apprentices' libraries and
mercantile libraries, producing farther demand for books, and aiding in
providing reward for those to whom the world is indebted for them.
Everybody must learn to read and write, and everybody _must_ therefore
have books; and to this universality of demand it is due that the sale of
those required for early education is so immense. Of the works of Peter
Parley it counts by millions; but if we take his three historical books
(price 75 cents each) alone, we find that it amounts to between half a
million and a million of volumes. Of Goodrich's United States it has been
a quarter of a million. Of Morse's Geography and Atlas (50 cents) the sale
is said to be no less than 70,000 per annum. Of Abbott's histories the
sale is said to have already been more than 400,000, while of Emerson's
Arithmetic and Reader it counts almost by millions. Of Mitchell's several
geographies it is 400,000 a year.

In other branches of education the same state of things is seen to exist.
Of the Boston Academy's collection of sacred music the sale has exceeded
600,000; and the aggregate sale of five books by the same author has
probably exceeded a million, at a dollar per volume. Leaving the common
schools we come to the high schools and colleges, of which latter the
names of no less than 120 are given in the American Almanac. Here again we
have decentralization, and its effect is to bring within reach of almost
the whole people a higher degree of education than could be afforded by
the common schools. The problem to be solved is, as stated by a recent and
most enlightened traveller, "How are citizens to be made thinking beings
in the greatest numbers?" Its solution is found in making of the
educational fabric a great pyramid, of which the common schools form the
base and the Smithsonian Institute the apex, the intermediate places being