A UNIVERSITY differs from other scholastic institutions in conferring “degrees.” Having taught a man his subject it offers him a certificate that he in his turn is able to teach it: the “degree” originally signified nothing more nor less than the graduate’s competence to profess the faculty in which it was obtained. This certificate of proficiency referred to the “three faculties” of theology, law, and medicine, to which was added later “the liberal arts.” The titles of “master,” “doctor,” and “professor” were at first synonymous. A master was a doctor in his subject, capable of professing it. The title of “master,” however, clung to the faculty of arts, that of “doctor” to the three liberal or learned professions.

The following degrees are now conferred: in arts, the bachelor and master (B.A., M.A.); in divinity, the bachelor and doctor (B.D., D.D.—formerly S.T.P., sacrae theologiae professor); in laws, bachelor, master and doctor (LL.B., LL.M., LL.D.[259]); in medicine, bachelor and doctor (M.B., M.D.); in music, bachelor, master, and doctor (Mus.B., Mus.M., Mus.D.); in surgery, bachelor and master (B.C., M.C.). Besides which a doctorate in science (Sc.D.), and a doctorate in letters (Litt.D.), are conferred on graduates in laws or in either of the last four faculties who have made some original contribution to the advancement of science or learning.[260]

The title of bachelor originally marked the conclusion of a period of study; it was not a degree, and bestowed no faculty to teach. Here, as elsewhere, a bachelor was an apprentice or aspirant to another status or position; and he remained in statu pupillari as he still is in theory to-day.[261]

It is only in modern times that the conferring of a degree follows upon a set written examination. For six hundred years the aspiring bachelor and master obtained their status by public disputations in the schools. Public exercises, called “acts, opponencies and responsions,” were regularly held during the period of probation, and the student advanced to the degree of master by steps which recall the rites of initiation in the catechumenate. After his first year the “freshman” became a “junior sophister”[262] in one of the faculties, and began to attend the school disputations, without however taking part in them. In his fourth year, as senior sophister, he qualified to be “questionist,” and presented himself as such at the beginning of Lent with ceremonies which turned him into a bachelor; ceremonies in which the Cambridge bedell figures as a veritable deacon. The procession was formed on Ash Wednesday and introduced into the arts schools by the bedell, who exclaimed: “Nostra Mater, bona nova, bona nova!” and “the father” (the presiding college senior) having proceeded to his place, the bedell suggested to him the stages of the ceremony: Reverende pater, licebit tibi incipere, etc. After this day the new bachelor was no longer a questionist but a “determiner” who determined in place of responding to the propositions raised in the schools. This status continued through Lent, and hence the incepting bachelor was described as stans in quadragesima.[263]

In due course the bachelor “commenced master of arts,” the inception taking place in Great S. Mary’s church on the day of the “Great Commencement” the second of July. This is the traditional time of year for the granting of degrees, and the ceremony is still called “Commencements” in Cambridge and in universities which, like Dublin, are derivative institutions. The status now attained was that of regent master, i.e. a junior graduate whose

business it was to teach the subjects he had himself been taught, for a period of five years; after which he became a non-regent, or full master.[264] The obligation to teach was part of the university theory of studies; so that when a Cambridge professor of our own time astonished his hearers by declaring “I know nothing of political economy, I have not even taught it” he was speaking in the spirit of the university maxim disce docendo. It was the scholar who had taught who was called magister and doctor in old times, not the men who, as is the case nowadays, “go down” with no other qualification than that of the bachelor and are nevertheless allowed in due time to write M.A. after their names. For the degree of M.A. has virtually ceased to exist: no one now “commences master,” and the master of arts is simply the bachelor who has spent three years away from the university, in which he has had time to forget what he once knew. Indeed as between the master and the bachelor the case is often inverted, and if the former is an ordinary degree man and the latter an honours man, it is the latter who is the master in his subject while the former is little else than a tyro. That the degree of master carries with it not one iota more of scholarship or experience is certainly not understood by the public, but the fact that it is understood elsewhere supplies the reason why such a small proportion of men now proceed to take it.[265]

It was not till the xviii century that written examinations were introduced, and from the day of their introduction the practice grew and flourished. Originally teaching and tests had both been oral, it was only as books became cheaper that the book in a measure supplanted the teacher, the written examination came to supplant the public acts and disputations, and the writing down of knowledge became the characteristic feature of Cambridge training. “Then know, sir, that at this place, all things—prizes, scholarships, and fellowships—are bestowed not on the greatest readers, but on those who, without any assistance, can produce most knowledge upon paper.” “Read six or eight hours a day, and write down what you know,” is a tutor’s advice ninety years ago.

The tripos, although it did not take shape till the middle of the same century derives its name from a custom of the xvith. On the day when the bachelor obtained his public recognition he had as his opponent in discussion one of the older bachelors who posed as the champion of the university. He sat upon a three-legged stool “before Mr. Proctor’s seat” and

disputed with the senior questionist. This stool or tripod was eventually to provide a name for the great written examination of succeeding centuries—the tripos. The champion bachelor was addressed as “Mr. Tripos,” and his humorous orations were called “tripos speeches.” Tripos verses were next written, and on the back of these the moderators, in the middle of the xviii century, began printing the honours list:[266] from this tripos list of names the transition was easy to tripos as the name of the examination itself—the tripos examination. These disputations degenerated in Restoration times to buffoonery, but the principle of examination made steady progress,[267] and there were probably no tripos speeches after the Senate House was built. In the xvi and xvii centuries, however, great personages had acts and disputations performed for their entertainment; and the tastes of Elizabeth and her Scotch successor were consulted when “a physic act” was kept before the former, while “a philosophy act” was reserved for James.

There were declamations, which did not escape Byron’s ridicule, in the xix century, but the last general public “act” was kept in 1839. The viva voce examination in the “Little go” which was only discontinued 14 years ago, and the viva voce and the “act” for the medical degree[268] are the only survivals to our day of that oral examination by which the scholar in the public acts constantly responded to the living voice of the magister. For the first time in their long history silence settled down upon the schools, and the eye replaced the ear as the channel of knowledge.[269]

The subjects in which university students were from the first exercised, were those of the Roman trivium and quadrivium, and the three faculties of theology law and medicine. A special importance must be assigned to the school of grammar—the first member of the trivium—at Cambridge. There is every reason to believe that it flourished there not only in the xiii century, under the patronage of the bishops of Ely, but also in the xiith. It was called the school of glomery (glomery, glamery, grammery)[270] and continued to be of importance till the xvi century, the last degree in grammar being granted in 1542.[271] Degrees in grammar were, nevertheless,

considered inferior to those in arts. To begin with, grammar was only studied for three years, arts for seven; grammar made the clerk, arts the professor. The introduction of the “new art,” Aristotle’s

analytical logic, increased the importance of the second member of the trivium: the name of Aristotle was a name to conjure with, but no new texts came to light to add lustre to the acquirements of the classical grammarian. As to the third member of the trivium, public rhetoric lectures were delivered in Cambridge by George Herbert (1620); but a century later Steele complains that both universities are “dumb in the study of eloquence.” There were still however rhetoric lectures in the xviii century, but they were not about rhetoric, and the public declamations in the senate house must be regarded as the last homage to this most ancient of arts, whose modern successor is the Union debating society.

If the original Cambridge schools were grammar schools after the pattern of OrlÉans and Bury-St.-Edmund’s, then the introduction of the arts faculty—the trivium and quadrivium—was the first step towards the formation of a universitas; and its appearance in the xii century would account for the university status of Cambridge in the opening years of the xiii century.[272] The first of the three learned faculties to take its place in the university was divinity, and with the rise of the earliest colleges provision was made for the study of the two faculties of theology and law. The faculty of medicine was the last to gain a footing. Cambridge never became famous as a school of any of the faculties in the sense in which Paris represented divinity, Bologna law, Montpellier medicine. The study of the civil and canon law was, however, prominent in the xv and early xvi centuries, but was shorn of its ecclesiastical moiety during the chancellorship of Thomas Cromwell when Peter Lombard and Gratian were banished the Cambridge schools.[273] Of the two universities Cambridge alone retains a recognition of canon law in the title of its bachelors masters and doctors of laws, LL.B., LL.M., and LL.D., a title commuted at Oxford into ‘bachelor and doctor of civil law,’ B.C.L. and D.C.L. The medical progress of the early xvi century which had been marked by the foundation in 1518 of the Royal College of Physicians reached Cambridge by means of two great men, Linacre from Oxford and its own distinguished son John Caius. Peterhouse had been the first college to admit medical studies, but our naturalists and physicians of later times, not content with the fare provided for them in England, took their degrees at the continental schools. Medicine, the last to obtain recognition, is now the most prominent representative of the learned faculties at Cambridge. Until 1874 when a theological tripos was formed, admitting to a degree in that subject only, theology was studied as part of the mathematical tripos. Law was taken as an additional subject, and degrees in divinity and law were proceeded to separately, as now. Satisfying the examiners in the theological, law, or natural sciences tripos does not admit the student to any but the arts degree. Medical students need not, however, graduate in arts, but may proceed at once, after taking the Previous Examination, to read for the M.B. degree.[274] In addition they must keep an “act,” which consists in reading a thesis previously approved by the Regius Professor of Physic. Having read the thesis (of which public notice is given) in the schools, the candidate is orally examined by the presiding Regius Professor of Physic. After this he becomes an M.B.[275]

A candidate who has obtained honours in Parts I. and II. of the law tripos or honours in Part I. in addition to an arts degree, is eligible for the degree in laws and may proceed to take the LL.B., the B.A., or both. Any candidate may “incept in law” (LL.M.), without further examination, who has taken a first class in both parts of the law tripos. If he has not this qualification he must have attained an honours standard in one part of the tripos, or be a qualified barrister or solicitor, or their equivalent in Scotland. In this case he must submit a dissertation on law, its history, or philosophy. The doctorate of laws is obtained after making an application in writing and sending in an original written contribution to the science of law. The LL.M. cannot incept till six years have elapsed from the end of his first term of residence, and five years must elapse between the master’s and the doctor’s degree.

A master of arts or of laws becomes a bachelor of divinity after subscribing certain declarations required by statute and preaching a sermon in the University church. Four years later he must “keep an act” or print a dissertation, in Latin or English, upon some matter of biblical exegesis or history, of dogmatic theology, ecclesiastical history or antiquities, or on the evidences of Christianity. The “act” is kept in the same way as that for the medical degree, and includes a viva voce examination. To proceed to the D.D. the same preliminary formalities as for the B.D. must be observed,[276] and a dissertation be printed on one of the same subjects. Five years must elapse between the two degrees, except in the case of a B.D. who is also an M.A. of at least twelve years’ standing. In fact the lapse of time is all that remains of incepting and proceeding to the higher degrees.

Until hard upon the close of the xv century there was no development in university studies. Erasmus in 1516 describes them as having consisted until thirty years previously in nothing but Alexander (the grammar text-book at Cambridge) the “Little Logicals,” the old exercises from Aristotle, the quaestiones from Duns Scotus. The study of mathematics, the new Aristotle, a knowledge of Greek, had all come within the last few years.[277]

Gradually the study of these “arts” yielded to the mathematical tripos. The subjects which had been intended to embrace a general education dropped out,[278] those which dealt with mathematics or mathematical physics encroached more and more, till in 1747 the historic tripos with which the name of Cambridge is identified was fully established. The conviction of the paramountcy of mathematical reasoning had been emphasised at the university by the discoveries of Newton, and when its mathematical studies were consolidated in the xvii century under the influence of Newton’s tutor, Isaac Barrow, “philosophy” was understood to mean the mathematical sciences, and continued to mean this and this only in English mouths till the threshold of our own times.[279] “By the study of the great relations of form,” writes an old Trinity student from the other side of the Atlantic, the Cambridge man acquired that “breadth of reasoning,” that power of generalisation, and perception of analogy “in forms and formulae apparently dissimilar,” which characterise the scientific mind. A study which bestows accuracy of scholarship, the perception of order and beauty, and “inventive power of the highest kind,” was that “in which for two hundred years all, and now more than half of the Cambridge candidates for honours exercise themselves.”[280]

Euclid and Newton filled the Cambridge horizon, and summed, as we have seen, all philosophy and all “arts.” Theology itself ceased to rival the mathematical disputations which became the business of the schools par excellence, and which were of such importance that the name of wranglers was exclusively applied to those most proficient in them, and “the senior wrangler” held the first position in the university. To attain this place it was necessary to have “fagged steadily every day” for six or eight hours. The quality of a man’s work would tell for nothing in the final result if he had neglected, with this end set before him, to practise that mere mechanical “pace” which would serve him in the great week.[281]

In 1822 the classical tripos was added. The history of classical studies at Cambridge is of special interest. The introduction of Greek into this country was a movement due directly to our universities: students of Oxford first learnt the language in Italy, but Cambridge as a university first gave it an academic welcome. The last echoes among Englishmen of the most wonderful idiom the world has heard resounded in the school of York, when John of Beverley, Wilfrid, and Bede could be described as Grecians, and where Alcuin taught Greek. More than seven centuries later the efforts of Fisher chancellor of the university of Cambridge with the co-operation first of Erasmus and then of Croke, re-established Greek in an English seat of learning.[282]

Erasmus had given up his dream of studying Greek in an Italian university and had settled down three years before the close of the century at Oxford on hearing that Grocyn was teaching there.[283] He had known some Greek before he went to Oxford, and he knew but little when he left, for its acquisition was still his great pre-occupation when he accepted Fisher’s invitation and went to Cambridge. The work of Grocyn and Linacre left no trace in their own university. When Colet introduced the study of Greek into his new school, Oxford showed itself hostile; when the Greek of Erasmus and Croke had taken permanent hold in Cambridge, the Oxford students rose up in arms against the Cambridge “Grecians,” and dubbing themselves “Trojans” sought street brawls with the “Greeks.” Finally, Sir Thomas More himself wrote a protest to his old university, which, he wrote, was engaged in casting ridicule on those who “are promoting all the interests of literature at your university, and especially that of Greek.” “At Cambridge, which you were always accustomed to outshine, even those who do not learn Greek are so much persuaded to its study in their university that they praiseworthily contribute to maintain a salaried professor who may teach it to others.”[284]

Colet took Greek into our public schools, in face of the hostility of his university; it was the Cambridge Grecians settled by Wolsey at Cardinal College who established it at both universities, and it was men like Ascham, Sir Thomas Smith, and Cheke who introduced it as Cambridge learning to the world outside. It has been well said that classics “kept a firm hold on the Cambridge mind.” The mantle of Erasmus Croke and Cheke fell upon Bentley and Porson who had no rivals among English classics and critics, and the services rendered by Cambridge as a university in this direction have been maintained by the present generation of scholars.[285]

By order of Thomas Cromwell “two daily public acts one of Greek the other of Latin” were to be held in all the colleges.[286] The Commonwealth Committee tried to revive the colloquial use of Latin and Greek in 1649, but the use of Latin in halls and walks ceased in this century, though it lingered in the college lectures, the declamations, and the “acts and opponencies.” It lingered also in the college chapels, but the only relic now remaining is the Latin grace in hall. The study of the classics themselves declined at Cambridge during the reign of Charles II. and Gray laments, while Bentley was still living, that these studies should have “fallen into great contempt.”[287]

It was the introduction of the classical tripos which gave a foothold for mental and moral philosophy. Occupation with Greek metaphysics, contact with the Greek mind, brought into relief the one-sidedness of the mathematical mind. It also placed the two methods in sharp contrast. For hitherto a fundamental antagonism between mathematical and metaphysical method had been unsuspected. It was not till the dispute between Whewell and Hamilton that the idea was pressed home that there were two philosophical methods, not one; that not only the reasoning which begs but the reasoning which questions the premiss has a right to be heard; that there was a philosophy of formal proof and one of philosophic doubt; that axiomatical reasoning lay on the one side, and the enquiry into the validity of the reasoning process itself on the other.

It was indeed by way of psychology that this other philosophy gained a foothold in the university. It was the contact with the scientific temper of Cambridge of psychology and psycho-physics—the modern science par excellence, the point of contact between the experimental method and mental philosophy, the fine flower of science since Darwin, its complement, its interpreter—which ensured the introduction of a moral sciences tripos. This it was which won recognition for an organon other than the mathematical. Metaphysics captured Cambridge based upon psychology, and here the two have never been divorced.

The problem of education at Cambridge before 1851 had been entirely concerned with the mutual relations of mathematics, physics, and classics. The two historic triposes had between them ousted even Locke and Paley, the relegation of which to the ordinary degree work nullified, for all serious philosophic purposes, the “grace” of 1779 which had devoted a fourth day to examination in “natural religion, moral philosophy, and Locke.”[288] Whewell who had lectured in 1839 as professor of casuistry on moral philosophy, was chiefly instrumental eleven years later in forming the new tripos. The college which took the leading part was S. John’s, where the Rev. J. B. Mayor was fellow and afterwards examiner; and the first man admitted to a fellowship for his attainments in this direction was a Johnian who came out senior moralist in 1863. When the tripos was framed, within twenty-five years of the final disappearance of all mental philosophy from the higher schools at Cambridge, it included papers on logic and psychology, on metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy and political economy. The political subjects now form a tripos to themselves, the Economics tripos created in 1903. Hort was a candidate in the first examination (1851) and L. B. Seeley in the third: until 1861, when Whewell and Leslie Stephen were among the examiners, the tripos was taken in addition to one of the others, and did not confer a degree.[289]

That vampire of the Cambridge schools, mathematics, had absorbed not only philosophy and the arts but also the natural sciences. It had been however through one of the great metaphysicians, Robert Clarke, that Newton’s physics had taken their place in the Cambridge curriculum, and Locke and Newton were there side by side, and had entered there together. It seemed, then, a simple revival and continuance of these traditions when the natural sciences tripos was formed in the same year as the moral sciences.

Empirical science at Cambridge dates from Linacre and Caius. The Puritan masters of the university discountenanced science, discouraged the university’s higher mathematics, but were led by their liking for the open bible greatly to favour the study of Greek. It is a remarkable fact that the natural ally of the reform movement was “Greek” not natural science.[290] Greek and “heresy” were equivalents; Caius, the ardent champion of medicine and empirical science in Cambridge, was one of the last to cling to the old “popishe trumpery.”[291] Just two hundred years before the publication of the “Origin of Species,” someone writes to Sir Thomas Browne the author of Religio Medici, from Darwin’s college at Cambridge, saying that there were then (1648) “so few helps” at the university for the student of medicine and science. With the Restoration scientific interests were revived, London setting the fashion to the seats of learning. But even at the close of the xviii century—that dark age of the universities—there was a professor of anatomy and there were lectures on “human anatomy and physiology” at Cambridge.[292] A few years later there was no physiology and the only physical study was astronomy.[293] Such

was the state of affairs two or three decades before the creation, in 1851, of a tripos which included physiology, comparative anatomy, chemistry, geology, botany, and mineralogy. The examination now comprises papers in 8 subjects, and is divided into two parts: chemistry, physics, mineralogy, geology, botany, zoology and comparative anatomy, human anatomy, and physiology. In the second part the last paper is upon human anatomy and vertebrate comparative anatomy. Cambridge owes its present prominent position as a teacher in the scientific world to the remarkable development of its scientific laboratories and equipment. For the purposes of the natural sciences tripos it possesses some of the finest laboratories and museums in the kingdom. The great Cavendish laboratory was built in 1874, the chemical in 1887, the engineering in 1894-9, the new medical school in 1904 with the museum of geology, while the same year saw the erection of the most complete botanical laboratory in England. Cambridge therefore which is “the most ancient scientific school in the country” is also among the best equipped.

Within a century of the decay of Norman French in England, a knowledge of modern languages began to assume value. Throughout the Tudor epoch it was those ecclesiastics and lawyers who were also linguists to whom the diplomatic posts and the secretaryships of state were entrusted. Latin did not cease to be the common official medium, but the growth of national dialects gave to a knowledge of these the importance which they must always possess for the diplomat and the trader. “Esperanto” will not take its place until nothing is spoken anywhere but Esperanto.

Some progress was made in these studies in both the universities in the xvi century:—“Petrarch and Boccace in every man’s mouth—the French and Italian highly regarded: the Latin and Greek but lightly,” writes Gabriel Harvey to Spenser: but the xixth opened at Cambridge barren of anything linguistic, ancient or modern, eastern or western, except the uncouth Latin of the schools.[294] The first languages tripos was formed in 1878 for the Semitic languages; the Indian languages tripos (1879) now forms part, with the Semitic tripos, of the Oriental languages tripos created in 1895. In 1886 the “medieval and modern languages” tripos came into being.

The complete list of Cambridge triposes with the date of their introduction is as follows:—(1) Mathematical 1747.[295] (2) Classical 1822. (3) Moral Sciences 1851. (4) Natural Sciences 1851. (5) Law 1858.[296] (6) Theological 1874. (7) Historical 1875.[297] (8) Medieval and Modern Languages 1886. (9) Mechanical Sciences 1894. (10) Oriental Languages 1895. (11) Economics 1903.

The value of the tests to which degrees have been attached in the past has varied considerably, and the same is true of the present. The M.A. degree in the xvi and following century was obtained with little or no examination; the disputations, as we have seen, were often idle forms, but the improvement in methods dates from 1680 when the proctors were replaced by moderators as overseers in the sophisters’ school. Fifty years later the building of the Senate House opened the new era, and the next twenty years (1730-50) saw rapid progress; so that the Cambridge degree was still something better than the Oxford when at the end of that century aspirants for degrees at both universities were adequately described as “term-trotters.”[298] The conspicuous university learning of the xvii century was untested and unstimulated by any adequate examination test; but earlier still the sheer number of years passed at a university must have had a value which is now lost. Seven years was the rule at Cambridge in the xv, xvi and xvii centuries, and the early history of the oldest of Cambridge colleges shows us the Peterhouse students residing all the year round.[299] Nowadays the standards of the honour and “poll” degree[300] are so wide apart that the terms bachelors and masters of arts applied equally to all degree work, are misleading. “He only wanted to take his degree, he did not work much” someone said to me a short time ago, and one felt one knew that degree. The honours class standard is also variable, and “a good year” raises the first class standard unduly.

The condition which characterised Cambridge studies before 1850 was that the mathematical tripos was obligatory on all candidates for honours. Between 1823 therefore and 1850 every classic was obliged to pass in one of the three classes of the mathematical tripos—he had, that is, to satisfy the examiners in two triposes. The results were often curious. Men like Macaulay, who became fellows of their college, were “ploughed” in the tripos, and professors of classics wrote M.A. after their names in virtue of a “poll” degree. The native repugnance to mathematical method in some men’s minds was constantly shown and at all stages of the university curriculum; Stratford Canning was “sorely puzzled” and indeed “in an agony of despair” over the study for which he was a “volunteer” at King’s, and Gray refused to graduate rather than pursue it. On the other hand the Cambridge “double first” meant a degree unrivalled in any part of the world.[301]

The present conditions for obtaining the B.A. degree are (a) residence for nine terms within the precincts of the university[302] (b) satisfying the examiners in one of the examinations, or groups of examinations to which a degree is attached. One may satisfy them in one of four ways: (1) by reading for and obtaining ‘honours’[303] (2) by taking the Previous, General, and Special examinations of the ordinary degree[304] (3) by being ‘allowed the ordinary degree,’ which may happen when a man fails to be placed in any class of a tripos, but when his work is allowed to count as tantamount to the examinations of the ordinary degree. (4) by being “excused the General,” which happens when a man has failed in the tripos examination, but his work is counted as putting him half way towards the ordinary degree. The aegrotat is a fifth way. If a man who has read for honours or for the ordinary degree falls sick, he is allowed to answer one or two of the examination papers only, and if he shows adequate knowledge of these is granted a degree, but is not placed in any class.[305]

There have been frequent changes and regroupings in all the examinations described, and other reforms are in contemplation. In 1850 the Universities Commission led to radical changes at both universities. It is now proposed to simplify greatly Part I. of the mathematical tripos, placing the candidates in divisions in alphabetical order, and thus abolishing the senior wrangler.[306] This classification is the rule in the second parts of all the large triposes, all of which have been divided since their formation. The abolition of compulsory Greek in the Previous Examination is bruited and re-bruited, but for the moment the question has been set at rest (May 1906) by a decided negative vote of the senate.

The method of tuition at Cambridge consists of the lecture, the class, the weekly paper, and the examinations. “Reading” has, naturally, taken the place of oral teaching to a large extent, but the lecture still holds its place in the university. In the view of many of the seniors that place is still too large a one: the lecture at which copious (often verbatim) notes are taken is, no doubt, in many instances thrown away, especially in those subjects in which the lecturer simply goes over ground covered by the existing text-books. The class permits of lecturer and student discussing difficulties, and here the college tutor’s rÔle is also of first importance;[307] the weekly paper (usually a “time paper,” to be answered in three hours) tests progress in the subject, and teaches a man how to “write down what he knows,” and to do so in a certain given time.

There was no salaried professorship in the university until Lady Margaret founded her chair of divinity in 1502. Before this, tuition in each faculty had been assigned to its doctors, the tuition in arts was left in the hands of the masters of arts. The next three professorships to be founded were also in the 3 faculties: the Regius of Divinity by the king in 1540, the Regius of Civil Law in the same year, and the Regius of Physic.[308] Henry also founded Regius professorships of Hebrew and Greek. In 1632 Sir T. Adams founded the Arabic, and in 1663, Henry Lucas, M.P. for the university, the Lucasian of Mathematics; the Knightbridge of Moral Philosophy was founded by a fellow of Peterhouse in 1683. Between that date and 1899 (when the professorship of Agriculture was founded) 35 professorships have been endowed, 16 of which are in natural sciences and medicine, 5 for languages, 4 for history and archÆology, 2 more for law, 1 for mental philosophy and logic, and 3 more for divinity, one of which, the Norrisian, is tenable, and is now held by a layman. Fisher and Erasmus were the first holders of the Lady Margaret professorship, and Selwyn, Lightfoot, and Hort held it between the years 1855 and 1892. Bentley and Westcott held the Regius professorship (1717, 1870). Sir T. Smith was the first to hold the Regius of Civil Law, which was also held by Walter Haddon, and by Sir Henry Maine when he was twenty-five years old, Glisson of Caius was one of the distinguished holders of the Regius of Physic (1636), Metcalfe of S. John’s and Cudworth both held the Hebrew professorship, Sir J. Cheke was the first to sit in the chair of Greek following on three such great predecessors and professors of Greek at Cambridge as Erasmus, Croke, and Sir Thomas Smith. Isaac Barrow (1660), Porson (1792) and Sir R. C. Jebb (1889-1906), all Trinity men, have also held it. The Lucasian of Mathematics was held by Barrow, then by Isaac Newton, then by his deputy Whiston of Clare, then by Sanderson of Christ’s, and the chair was filled in the xix century by Airy and Sir George Stokes. Roger Cotes was the first to hold the Plumian of Astronomy (1707) founded three years previously by the Archdeacon of Rochester, who endowed it with an estate at Balsham. Professor Adams, the discoverer of Neptune, held the Lowndean of Astronomy and Geometry (1858-1892). The Regius of Modern History (George I. 1724)[309] was held by the poet Gray, by Sir J. Stephen, Charles Kingsley, Sir J. Seeley, and Lord Acton: the Cavendish professorship of Experimental Physics (founded by Grace of the Senate 1871) was first filled by Clerk Maxwell and Lord Rayleigh; F. W. Maitland (ob. Dec. 1906) held the Downing of Law; and the new Quick professorship of biology has just been offered to an American graduate.[310]

Next in dignity to professors are the Readers in the different subjects, who act as a sort of suffragans and assistants to professors; and next to these come the lecturers in branches of knowledge which range from comparative philology to electrical engineering, from medical jurisprudence to ethnology.[311]

The Pope was the fountain of graduate honour in the middle ages and conferred degrees in all the faculties, and he does so still. Doctors and masters from Rome would receive

incorporation at Cambridge, and Englishmen without a degree would be given, on occasion, a degree by the Pope.[312] The general statute of Henry VIII. conveying

to the primate all licences and dispensations which had heretofore “been accustomed to be had and obtained from Rome,” transferred the faculty of conferring degrees in England from the Pope to the Archbishop of Canterbury. This faculty had, until the date of the statute, formed part and parcel of the legatine powers, and had been exercised as such by Wolsey. It was among the more important powers transferred under the statute, relating to licences of the taxable sum of £4 and over, and required confirmation by Letters Patent under the great seal, or enrolment in Chancery. The right was exercised by successive archbishops, and every faculty so granted rehearsed the authority of parliament by which authority the said power was now vested in the see of Canterbury. In the reign of George I. the power was for the first time disputed. The then Bishop of Chester refused to induct a Lambeth B.D. and a law suit followed, as a result of

which a prescriptive and statutable right was made out for the practice. The matter was then carried by appeal to the King’s Bench and decided in favour of the archbishop, three years later, in 1725.

From the accession of Charles II. till the end of the century the usual recipients were members of one or other of the universities, and when this was not the case incorporation in Cambridge university was granted with the proviso that no precedent was thereby created. Between 1539, when Cranmer created a D.D., and the accession of Charles II., only seven instances of archi-episcopal degrees are recorded.[313] Over 450 were conferred between 1660 and 1848, and some 334 have been conferred since.[314] A Cantabrigian primate confers the Cambridge hood, an Oxonian the Oxford. There have been many instances of the incorporation of men who were recipients of the ‘Lambeth degree’ in one or other of the colleges. The Lambeth M.A. does not include membership of the Senate or of Convocation.[315]

During Stuart times there were several examples of the conferring of degrees by royal mandate; a custom commuted to the now traditional compliment, when a sovereign or prince receives a degree, of conferring degrees on any persons he may wish associated with him in the honour. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, whose studies at Cambridge were interrupted by diplomatic missions, was created M.A. by royal mandate.

Ad eundem degrees, admitting a graduate to the same degree which he already enjoys elsewhere, are granted by all universities; but such degrees are no longer granted at Cambridge as a simple right.[316]

The university confers other “complete” or “titular” degrees on certain persons who have not qualified for them by residence and examination at Cambridge. A list of those on whom this honour has been bestowed since 1859 is printed in the Cambridge Calendar. The complete degrees are conferrable upon members of the royal family, privy councillors, bishops and bishops designate, peers,[317] the judges of the High Court, the deans of Westminster, of the chapel royal Windsor, and of Cathedral churches; and also upon heads of colleges in the university, and other distinguished persons who already have a Cambridge degree and are either conspicuous for merit or holders of university office. Titular degrees may be conferred on Englishmen or foreigners of conspicuous merit.

A propos of a recent list of ‘birthday honours’ a weekly literary newspaper reminded us “that commerce, politics, and retired generals are not the only vitalizing forces in this country”; it blamed a public which it described as “increasingly illiterate and sheepish,” and adjured the universities to make no “concessions to popular prejudice” but “to confine the honours they are able to give to those who deserve them.” It is in fact ludicrous and absurd that the universities should be expected to come in with their blessing in cases of non-academic success, and that degrees should be mere acclamations of popular verdicts. The public should have every reason to regard these as the blue riband of academic attainment in contrast with the attainments of successful ignorance or successful vulgarity, or indeed with all those kinds of success which are sufficiently rewarded by the vox populi, and in other ways. It is expected that a university should set a limit to the assumption that every good and perfect thing is at the beck and call of the mere plutocrat, and should confer its honours and seat in its rectorial chairs only those persons who present academic qualifications. When one sees with what punctilious assiduity every mark and brand of tradesman and tradesmen’s interests receives recognition nowadays, one turns with anxiety to the Cambridge list of honorary degree men. The university’s awards have not yet however been assigned to people who have grown rich on “Trusts,” business ‘slimness,’ or industries like the canned meat industry; whose title to recognition is that they have been successful speculators. How very nice it would be if instead of installing gasometers in the leper colonies or sending the latest pattern of trichord overstrung grand piano to the deaf and dumb schools of Europe and America, some rich man, with a less pretty taste for publicity, should endow the university with a million pounds

sterling! Should he be the recipient of an honorary degree? Would it not be churlish to refuse it? If anything could increase one’s respect for the benefactor it would be his refusal of this kind of recognition of his services. However there is no harm in very occasional exceptions, because these shout the exceptional circumstances and confuse no one. It is different altogether when to create an honorary degree list Mr. Anybody and Mr. Nobody are called upon to step up. It seems a simple programme that periods marked by dearth in merit should also be marked by dearth of awards, but when did a simple programme ever prove attractive from the days of Naaman downwards?

When we say that neither the elementary nor the advanced studies of a university exist simply with a view to providing the members of the community with a profession or the means of making their living, we say what is a little less obvious, and trench on ground which is hotly debated. Thousands upon thousands, it may be urged, have always gone to a university to learn a profession, and thousands who have not had this end in view have yet gone up there with no intention of acquiring learning. The university has always prepared for the professions, why not for the industries; why should it not comprise technical colleges? Hitherto, however, the universities have prepared men for the learned professions, and there is a difference between learning philosophy, theology, biblical exegesis, jurisprudence and political philosophy, or physiology and comparative anatomy for the purposes of a life profession, and learning agriculture, forestry, military tactics, or mining engineering. The growth of great branches of industry has however been as great as the growth of knowledge and the sciences; the conditions of modern life are entirely and altogether changed, competition extends far beyond the industrial world, to the universities themselves, and to the struggle for existence of knowledge for its own sake. Without supposing that this last condition will be permanent, one may still think that the universities could not refuse to teach what are called “the modern subjects,” which means industries like scientific agriculture or electrical engineering that have more money in them than the professions. In a way, too, it is only a turning of the tables; when the learned professions were studied it was because they promised the profitable careers.

It need not by any means be competition which urges the university to undertake the ‘modern subjects’; it may be, and it is, the persuasion that its rÔle does not end with creating a career, that a university possesses advantages extrinsic to the degree taken, or even the work done at it. The truth perhaps is that the present conditions of life afford an object to universities as far-reaching as has ever been allotted to them since their foundation. In these days of haste, and unchewed cuds of learning, they can suggest the value of leisure—and when a man is now sent to Cambridge or Oxford this fact alone is some security that he and his are content not to put haste and quick results above and before everything else. The lazy man we have always with us, the man in a hurry is a modern product, and suffers from a modern disease with which a university is better able, by latent influence and tradition, to deal than any other institution. And when it has taught the value of intellectual digestion, the number of those things which can only be well learnt by being gradually learnt, and in due season, has the university nothing more to teach? Our modern malady of haste, of quick methods, and quick results has a commercial basis, a certain standard of values and returns which is best so described. The academic spirit is the antagonist of this spirit, of the love of publicity, the self-advertisement, the liking for cheap and unearned rewards. Even as a business maxim it is being preached again that work done for its own sake is the only lasting work. The university may be a bulwark against false values in life, against the restlessness which is confounded with action, the constant change which is not the same thing as adaptation, against the prejudice that certain good things are not always and everywhere ends in themselves. And there is another conspicuous service which a university can perform. The commercial standard is the root of our social vulgarity, and the academic life has been in all ages that ‘simple life’ of which we hear so much. It is not necessary for generations of Englishmen to grow up to regard ‘poverty as a crime,’ or to subscribe to the worship of mere prosperity and success. A university may always be a protest against these and other mental vulgarities, against even that debasing of the good coin of the King’s English in which Milton saw the incipient undoing of a nation. What better place for combating the last ridiculous refuge of English mauvaise honte—the shamefacedness which prefers to speak one’s own language incorrectly? Something every man at least who reads for a tripos must learn about the uses of work, about its respect, something about breadth of view and accuracy of detail—and also about the legitimate support which such work is in life. It will be said that a man’s personal character and his home life inculcate all these things and give him the means to meet the shafts of outrageous fortune. But what the university can give him which his own personal character and probably his home surroundings cannot, is the way to set about making of learning a possession for ever. Some nice person said “mathematics is such a consolation in affliction,” and there is much to be said for the point of view.

A university can teach these things because, unlike technical colleges or seminaries for the professions, it exists first and foremost for the advancement of learning. Traditionally inseparable from this is its other object—education; and together they provide the tests it applies to all such questions as ‘how far it shall adapt itself to a commercial standard.’ For a university is not only a place of higher studies, it is the nursery of study; and to instil the love of learning for its own sake will always be required of it. In the words of Elizabeth of Clare: “When skill in learning has been found, it sends out disciples who have tasted its sweetness.” In the last resort universities must stand for these things; the day when they cease to do so the idea of a university will have oozed out of them. Like all good things the university will bring forth from its treasure things new and old. We shall not look for degrees in cricket, but there may be degrees in agriculture, degrees in engineering, degrees in forestry. Why not, if a degree signifies a diploma of competence? But there should be degrees and degrees. There should be licentiates in the technical arts by the side of bachelors and masters in the liberal arts: the university must claim to mete with its own measure, and to teach its own lesson to all sorts of men. Hinc lucem et pocula sacra——