646 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



Science, however specialised, within the old Faculty of Arts, 

 was due mainly to snobbishness on both sides. The Arts men 

 were confident that a degree of Bachelor of Science, being new, 

 would be necessarily cheap and probably corrupt ; an inveterate 

 prejudice in Oxford which has cropped up again, this month, in 

 an amendment proposed by the Council to the procedure for 

 Research Degrees. The Science men were misled in shelter- 

 ing their new studies under a title which however ancient and 

 respectable was at the same time quite inappropriate. The 

 Chemical course, for example, contained nothing but Chemistry 

 and some elementary Physics ; it was in no sense a course in 

 Arts or even in an Art, except in so far as it included "Divvers " 

 and was preceded like all other degree courses by Responsions. 

 It was Science pure and simple and ought to have been 

 labelled so. 



Among all these changes, one thing alone remained, the 

 requirement of Greek and Latin at the preliminary stage of 

 " Smalls." Here, again, there is a widespread misconception 

 to be corrected at the outset. It is not the fact, it never has 

 been the fact and I sincerely hope it never may be, that the 

 University of Oxford refuses to register a student who does 

 not know Greek up to the standard of Responsions. Readers 

 of Verdant Green will remember that it was normal in the 

 'fifties for an undergraduate to reside during several terms 

 before going in for Responsions. Responsions, in fact, stood 

 then where Pass Moderations stand now : and where the 

 Intermediate stands at modern universities. 



Here, as in so many other ways, blame has come to the 

 university through the action of powerful corporations, whose 

 boast it is, if we may believe their latter-day spokesmen, that 

 they are organically unconnected with it. Residential colleges, 

 beset with more applicants for admission than they had sets 

 of rooms to offer, naturally selected for admission those who 

 undertook to save college tutors some terms of drudgery, by 

 passing Responsions before coming into residence. The practice 

 is now almost universal ; it has been extended already in 

 special cases to our present Intermediate, the " First Public 

 Examination," colloquially known as " Mods " ; and it is certain 

 that any one of the stronger colleges could play this game 

 habitually, if it chose to do so. All it has to do is to present 

 " this my pupil " to the Vice-Chancellor for admission to the 



