The central object in the picture is the tower of St. John’s College Chapel, with the tower of Great St. Mary’s a little to the right and King’s College Chapel to the extreme right. In the middle distance on the left is Jesus College and the Round Church, and nearer to us we look down upon the roofs of Magdalene College. The building on the right in foreground is St. Giles’ Church, the original foundation of which takes us back nearly to the Conquest. In the extreme distance is the rising ground known as the Gog-Magog Hills.] ordinary and the honour degree. Newnham at first prepared its students for the Higher Local examinations and the triposes, discountenanced the Previous Examination and would not allow its students to prepare for the Ordinary degree. In the event, Newnham has had to abandon the examination which was the original _raison d’être_ of its existence, and Girton has had virtually to abandon its claim to examination for the ordinary degree. This means that every woman who takes a degree takes it in honours: the same is true of no college of men in Cambridge except King’s. The founders of Newnham considered it a waste of time for women to come to the university to qualify themselves for that Ordinary degree which graces the majority of our men, and which represented such a mysterious weight of learning to sisters at home in the old days. This decision has a double _ricochet_--it is good for the colleges, for only the better women come up; it is bad for many women who, like many men, are unfit to do tripos work and who might yet enjoy from residence at Cambridge the same advantages--direct and extraneous--which the ‘poll’ degree man now obtains. [Sidenote: Girton.] The first committee for the future Girton College met on December 5th 1867;[449] but the foundation of Girton dates from October 16, 1869 when a hired house at Hitchin, midway between Cambridge and London, was opened to six students at a time when it was not thought advisable to plant a women’s college in Cambridge. The college at Hitchin[450] was carried on under serious tuitional and other disadvantages--lecturers from the university, for example, were paid for the time occupied in the journey--and in 1873 the college was removed to Girton, a village two miles out of Cambridge. [Sidenote: The manor and village of Girton.] The manor of Girton on the Huntingdon road--the old via Devana--belonged in the xi century to Picot the Norman sheriff of Cambridge who expropriated part of its tithes for the endowment of the canons’ house and church of S. Giles which is passed by Girtonians on their way from the college to the town. In the xvi century the manor provided a rent charge for Corpus Christi College. Earlier still it was the site of a Roman and Anglo-Saxon burial ground (discovered in a college field in 1882-6). The college itself is built on old river gravel. [Sidenote: The founders.]