study of the plausibilities of Locke and Paley, (no very unlikely issue, we should fear, at least under present circumstances,) then this moral sciences' tripos also is one of those things which had better never have been. We repeat that Cambridge has incurred great blame, if she has allowed herself to mislead, or to seem to mislead, the popular mind on these matters. The more talkative portion of the public, and the newspapers which commonly represent that more talkative portion, have evidently been inclined to interpret this movement of Cambridge as an indication of a most utilitarian system of education coming to supplant the old rules. They anticipate all sorts of civil engineering, butterfly-dissecting, light geology, and a whole Babel of modern languages, to be victoriously let loose on the home where for many a century Wisdom has sat with the scroll of Plato on her knee, and Science has unravelled the wizard lore of fluxion and equation. The senate of Cambridge is egregiously mistaken if it supposes that it will win over to its body the students of these popular branches of knowledge, by following the dictation of the popular taste. Those who want to be civil engineers will not come to a university to learn their art. They will follow Brunel and Stephenson, and see how the work is actually done in practice; and those who do so will soon prove themselves far superior, _quoad_ civil engineering, to the Cambridge-bred theorist. In like manner, a month's flirtation in Paris, or a few games at _écarté_ with a German baron, will teach the student of modern languages more French or German than all the philologists of Oxford, Cambridge, or Eton can impart in a year. "Quam quisque nôrit artem, in hâc se exerceat." If the public have mistaken the functions of the university, it is the more incumbent on her to assert them correctly. Nor is the outcry less groundless, that the universities have failed to furnish the best men in law and medicine. With regard to the law, certain gentlemen were even cited by name, in leading articles of newspapers, as types of the class of men who were now taking the lead at the bar, and representing an altogether different school from that trained at the universities. The fact of the university men being supplanted, or being likely to be supplanted, at the bar, may admit of considerable question. But it is not, after all, the question by which the universities are to be judged. They do not undertake to make men great lawyers or skilful physicians; this, where it does belong to their functions, is a collateral duty, and not the main object of their training. That object is distinctly avowed in their own formularies. That noble clause in the "bidding prayer" will attach itself to the memories of most of those who have heard it: