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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



high reputation in moral science; Manchester is renowned for her 

 physics, clieniistry, and engineering; and London for her medical 

 schools. But Oxford and Cambridge are strong in many branches. 

 Financially powerful, they are able to attract the majority of prom- 

 ising and eminent men, whence has resulted that remarkable cote- 

 rie of unrivaled intellects through whom the above-named univer- 

 sities are chiefly known to the outer and foreign world. This char- 

 acteristic has its opposite illustrated in the United States, where 

 the tendency is centrifugal, no one or two universities or colleges 

 having advantages so decided as inevitably to attract most of the 

 best minds, and where, in consequence, the best minds are found 

 scattered from California to Harvard and Pennsylvania. 



The characteristic peculiar to Cambridge and Oxford, and which 

 distinguishes them not only from American but also from all other 

 universities in England and elsewhere, is the college system. Thus 

 Cambridge is a collection of eighteen colleges which, though nomi- 

 nally united to form one institution, are really distinct, inasmuch 



as each is a separate com- 

 munity with its own build- 

 ings and grounds, its own 

 resident students, its own 

 lecturers, and Fellows — a 

 community which is sup- 

 ]iorted by its own moneys 

 without aid from the univer- 

 sity exchequer, and which in 

 most matters legislates for 

 itself. The system is not 

 unlike the American Union 

 on a small scale, with its 

 cluster of governments and 

 their relation to a supreme 

 center. The advantages of 

 tliis scheme might theoret- 

 ically be very great. With 

 each college handsomely en- 

 dowed and, though manag- 

 ing its own affairs, entering 

 freely, in addition, into 

 those relations of reciproc- 

 ity wliicli make for the good of the whole, one can readily im- 

 agine an ideal academic (•oiiiuioiiwcalth. And while the present 

 condition of the university can scarcely be said to approximate 

 very closely to such an academic Utopia, it yet derives from its 



J. .J. Thomson, M. A., i- . U. S., Trinity. 

 Professor of Experimental Physics. 



