The refusal of the degree, of the magic letters _B.A._ and _M.A._, to women, need not be discussed here. That women have the same use for the degree as men is obvious; that it strains their alleged liking for self-sacrifice too far to suggest that they prefer to forgo the legitimate rewards of their work, not less so; and it should not be regarded either as satisfactory or logical that when they do the same work the men only should have the recompense. Dublin university has just offered an _ad eundem_ degree to all women who had qualified themselves for the degree at Cambridge or Oxford--187 have taken the _B.A._, 121 the _M.A._, and three have become doctors of letters or science. The credit of this act belongs to the gallant Irishman, and the coffers of Dublin university have thus been enriched, very warrantably, at the expense of the impoverished coffers of Cambridge which sent the far larger number of graduates.[487] We have moved step by step from the cautious recommendation of the university that the names of the young girls examined for the Local Examination should not appear, and that no class lists should be published (1865) and the informal examination for the triposes, when for nine years (until 1881) the examiners in the classical tripos “objected to state” what class had been attained, to the present state of things when all the “publicity and intrusion” dreaded forty years back in the case of little girls being examined somewhere privately in the same town as little boys, is annually given to hundreds of women in the highest examination in the country in the midst of the university. There had been prophets who opined that under these circumstances Cambridge would be deserted by the other sex. Visions of the halls of Trinity and John’s empty and forsaken, while Girton and Newnham poured forth a ceaseless flow of undergraduates disturbed the sleep of these prophets and seemed worth putting on record in their waking moments. No sooner were the Local Examinations opened to girls in 1865 than the number of boys entered rose from 629 to 1217;[488] and the largest entry of undergraduates on record was that of this present year 1906-7. What has happened? Has a robuster generation of undergraduates arisen, or were the undergraduates of the “seventies” and “eighties” simply maligned? [Sidenote: The status of women students at Cambridge and Oxford.]