Attendance at professorial lectures was theoretically obligatory, and ’since not only reading and thought, but practice also, is of the greatest avail towards proficiency in learning,’ it was required that the candidate for a degree should ’dispute’ in the Schools at stated and frequent times during the whole course of his academic career. Beginning by listening to the disputations of his seniors (a custom which perhaps survives in the modern fashion which sometimes provides a ’gallery’ at the ceremony of _viva voce_), he was as time went on required himself to maintain and publicly defend doctrines in a manner which would be highly embarrassing to his modern successor--’responding’ at first to the arguments of the stater of a theory, and with riper wisdom being promoted to the position of Opponent.’ This opposing and responding was termed ’doing generals.’ ’Argufying’ was the business of the University in the seventeenth century, and had been so for a long time. On the memorable occasion of Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Oxford in the year 1566, Her Majesty was entertained intermittently with disputations on the moon’s influence on the tides, and the right of rebellion against bad government. Thus, Archbishop Laud required of the seventeenth-century undergraduate so many disputations before he became a _sophista_, and so many again before he could be admitted to the degree of Bachelor; and if the system had worked in practice as it was intended to do in theory, young Oxford would not have had an easy time of it. In the days of Antony Wood’s undergraduate career exercises in the ’Schooles’ were ’very good.’ ’Philosophy disputations in Lent time, frequent in the Greek tongue; _coursing_ very much, ending alwaies in blowes,’ which Wood considers scandalous; but at least it shows the serious spirit of the disputants. But a University can always be trusted to temper the biting wind of oppressive regulations to its shorn alumni; and there can be no doubt that the comparative slackness and sleepiness of the eighteenth century--a somnolence which it is easy to exaggerate, but impossible altogether to deny--must have tended to wear the sharp corners off the academic curriculum. Indications that this was so are not wanting. After all, there must have been many ways of avoiding originality in a disputation. A writer in ’Terrae Filius’ (1720) states the case as follows:--