The Oxford Museum. 281 



ancient time remain now in Oxford. The examinations have 

 passed away or have other names. To be sure there are some 

 old tests which are preserved, but only to denote the epoch — as 

 the Trilobites indicate the Silurian era. There still are prison 

 gratings to the College windows — strong bolts and locks to the 

 ponderous College-gates, — the Vice-Chancellor is still environed 

 by a procession of pokers, — still the porter keeps the gate, regard- 

 less of the signs of the times, " of foreign levy or domestic treason," 

 intent only upon the hour of nine, the tolling of Great Tom and 

 the periodicity of gate-fines. Otherwise, Oxford is changed. She 

 no longer thinks fit to exert her right in suppressing an unim- 

 portant book or in raising a harmless Professor into an inconve- 

 nient notoriety, — she leaves heterodoxy to die a natural and obscure 

 death, and addresses herself to her proper function of circulating 

 positive and practical truth and becoming a central light to the 

 towns of industrial England. We have noted with pleasure the 

 gradual extinction of the ol town-and-gown feud, — the urban- 

 ity of the University in sallying forth as in earlier times from its 

 walls, — and lastly, the proposal to convert the RadclifFe Library 

 into a free library, where artizan readers shall be admitted by 

 night — as in some good time coming we may hope to see them 

 admitted within the walls of a National Library. The influx 

 of a still more healthy element we have to record in the com- 

 pletion of a Museum for Science. This has long been felt a want 

 in Oxford. A knowledge of words rather than of things was 

 the great aim of the ancient time. Half of the pedantry of the 

 place arose from the pride of classical lore and over-bookishness. 



Ethics were better understood than Physics — Aristotle's ' Or- 

 ganon ' than his ' Physica.' It does seem strange, as Dr. Acland 

 well puts it, that " it has taken some centuries from the epoch of 

 Roger Bacon, followed here by Boyle, Harvey, Linacre and Sy- 

 denham, besides nearly 200 years of unbroken publication of the 

 Royal Society's Transactions, to persuade this great English Uni- 

 versity to engraft, as a substantive part of the education of her 

 youth, any knowledge of the great material design of which the 

 Supreme Master-Worker has made us a constituent part." 



We have heard one university authority argue that the Ptole- 

 maic system was more conducive to religion than the Copernican, 

 and we learn that not long ago a Head of a college seriously alluded 

 in a university sermon to the " mysterious convolutions of domestic 

 furniture." That religion has nothing to fear, but everything to 



