100 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



one or more or all of them. Universities are traced by some 

 historical writers back to the time of the Roman empire, and by 

 others to the schools of the Arabians. The fact is, professional 

 education in theology, jurisprudence and medicine, and sometimes 

 astronomy or astrology, as it was in those days, was engrafted 

 upon various stems constituting the institutions which, in the 

 middle ages, most resembled the modern universities. Before the 

 invention of printing, oral instruction was of course of greater 

 relative consequence than after, and the university of Bologna 

 numbered ten thousand pupils. After the invention of printing, 

 says Libri, the professors had fewer attendants upon their lectures, 

 but their instruction reached further. As extremes meet, events 

 moving in a circle, so in those times as in those latter days, tra- 

 veling was a great source of information, but the distances we 

 should count as but travel about one's room. The same professors 

 were employed in several institutions lecturing as itinerants, 

 which we now deem a practicable feature for modern improve- 

 ment, the scale of distance being however vastly enlarged. A 

 professor's certificate of study occupied the position of the more 

 modern degree, which dates only from the twelfth century. In- 

 struction was, in the Italian universities, gratuitous from the 13th 

 century. The democratic element (using the words in their 

 largest acceptation) was strong in these institutions, for one of the 

 luminaries in the Paris University was the son of a washerwoman. 

 The privileges of professors and students, their exemption from 

 arbitrary rule and from party changes, united in one brotherhood 

 the friends of knowledge and liberty. 



Ley den. 

 In Holland the Prince of Orange, as a reward to the citizens of 

 Leyden for the bravery which they displayed during the siege of 

 the town by the Spaniards in 1773-74, gave them the choice of 

 exemption from certain taxes, or a University. To their credit 

 they chose the latter, setting at that early day the example (if a 

 penny saved is a penny earned) of encountering taxation for a 

 public education. The reputation of this establishment was at one 

 time so high, that it was called the "Athens of the West." The 

 great physicist, Des Cartes, and the critic, Scaliger, the jurist, 



