=The ‘Seven Liberal Arts’ as the Curriculum.=--The curriculum of the monastic schools was at first elementary and narrow. It included only reading, in order to study the Bible; writing, to copy the sacred books; and calculation, for the sake of computing Church festivals. But after a while the classical learning was gradually introduced in that dry and condensed form of the ‘seven liberal arts’, which was also used by the cathedral schools. This mediæval canon of studies was a gradual evolution from Græco-Roman days. The discrimination of these liberal subjects may be said to have begun with Plato, whose educational scheme included a higher group of studies, consisting of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy; and during the later days of Greece and Rome these ‘liberal’ subjects of Plato were combined with the ‘practical’ studies of the sophists,--grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. These ‘seven liberal arts’ were definitely fixed during the fifth and sixth centuries A. D., through several treatises by such writers as Martianus Capella, Boëthius, and Cassiodorus; and the grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic eventually became classed as the _trivium_ or lower studies, and the arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy as the _quadrivium_ or higher (Fig. 9). While this curriculum was not a broad one, the scope was much wider than would be supposed. ‘Grammar’ was an introduction to literature, ‘rhetoric’ included some knowledge of law and history, ‘dialectic’ paved the way for metaphysics, ‘arithmetic’ extended beyond mere calculation, ‘geometry’ embraced geography and surveying, ‘music’ covered a broad course in theory, and ‘astronomy’ comprehended some physics and advanced mathematics. [Sidenote: Dictation and memorizing.] [Sidenote: Donatus and Priscian,] [Sidenote: Aristotle, Euclid, Boëthius, and Ptolemy.]