rely with science. It
was quite as much trouble to introduce linguistic studies into the old
universities in the Renaissance time to replace science, as it was to
secure room for science by pushing out the classics in the modern time.
Indeed the two revolutions in education are strikingly similar when
studied in detail. Men who had been brought up on science before the
Renaissance were quite sure that that formed the best possible means of
developing the mind. In the early nineteenth century men who had been
formed on the classics were quite as sure that science could not replace
them with any success.

There is no pretence that this view of the medieval universities is a
new idea in the history of education. Those who have known the old
universities at first hand by the study of the actual books of their
professors and by familiarity with their courses of study, have not been
inclined to make the mistake of thinking that the medieval university
neglected science. Professor Huxley in his "Inaugural Address as Rector
of Aberdeen University" some thirty years ago stated very definitely his
recognition of medieval devotion to science. His words are well worth
remembering by all those who are accustomed to think of our time as the
first in which the study of science was taken up seriously in our
universities. Professor Huxley said:

The scholars of the medieval universities seem to have studied
grammar, logic, and rhetoric; arithmetic and geometry;
astronomy, theology, and music. Thus their work, however
imperfect and faulty, judged by modern lights, it may have
been, brought them face to face with all the leading aspects
of the many-sided mind of man. For these studies did really
contain, at any rate in embryo, sometimes it may be in
caricature, what we now call philosophy, mathematical and
physical science, and art. _And I doubt if the curriculum of
any modern university shows so clear and generous a
comprehension of what is meant by culture, as this old Trivium
and Quadrivium does._

It would be entirely a mistake, however, to think that these great
writers and teachers who influenced the medieval universities so deeply
and whose works were the text-books of the universities for centuries
after, only had the principles of physical and experimental science and
did not practically apply them. As a matter of fact their works are full
of observation. Once more,