legislators followed up the alteration which we have been describing by the adoption of their recent measures, by which they effected an extension of their field of "honours" similar to that which they had already accomplished in the qualifications for the ordinary degree. To the old "triposes," or classes of honours in mathematics and classics, they have now added two more--namely, one in moral sciences and one in natural sciences. Before, however, we offer any conjectures as to the probable effect of these yet untried changes, we must remind our readers of a certain characteristic of the Cambridge system, which is important in estimating the internal relations of the late reforms. The academic life of Cambridge circulates through two concurrent systems, which we may term the university and the collegiate system. The university is one corporation, and each individual college is altogether another. The union between the two systems might be dissolved without difficulty. If the university were to abandon her ancient seat, and take up some new abode, as she did for a time at Northampton some centuries ago, the colleges might still remain as places of education, with but little modification of their present character. The older system--the university--has had its functions gradually absorbed in a great measure by the collegiate. The earliest form in which Cambridge appears, dimly seen in hoar antiquity, is that of a congregation of students, commonly living together for mutual convenience in hostels, governed by a code of statutes, and endowed with the privilege of granting degrees. Then came the founders of colleges, with their noble endowments, and reared edifices, in which societies of these students should live together under a common rule, and form distinct corporations by themselves, for purposes connected with, and auxiliary to, those of the university. The latter body has from time immemorial matriculated only those who were already members of some one or other of the colleges; but there probably was a time at which a student in the university was not necessarily a member of any college, until by degrees these foundations absorbed into their composition the whole of the academic population. By-and-by, the principal part of the functions of teaching also lapsed into the hands of the colleges. In the old times, the university discharged this duty by means of the public readings or lectures by the newly admitted masters of arts, (termed _regents_,) and by the keeping of acts and opponencies--being certain _vivâ voce_ disputations--by the students. To this system, comprehending the main studies of the place, was superadded, by individual endowment or royal beneficence, the collateral information on special subjects given by the professors. The colleges were altogether subsidiary to this mode of instruction--the practice being that every student who enrolled himself in the ranks of a particular college, must do so under the