Our business is, however, with the University. One cannot fix a deliberate date of foundation. Universities, like every other great design, have small beginnings, and the origin of schools at Cambridge was probably insignificant. Cambridge is on the border of the Fenland, and the Fenland contained the richest abbeys in England. Besides the great house of Ely, where the bishop was by virtue of his office abbot, there were, within easy reach of Cambridge, the four Benedictine abbeys of Peterborough, Ramsey, Thorney and Crowland, all of them in the very first rank of English houses. Life in the Fens was hard and dismal, and even Peterborough, the Medehampstead or Goldenburgh of Saxon times, must have been largely under water for a great part of the year. The towns on the borders, Cambridge or Stamford, formed an excellent asylum for those brethren who were too weak to endure the unhealthy mists of the Nene and Welland Wash. During the middle ages, Cambridge bristled with small religious houses, cells depending on the greater abbeys; and in these the young monks of Crowland and the other houses received their education. This was the beginning of the University. The academic life was the life of the cloister. The teaching consisted of the ordinary medieval sciences, Aristotle and the scholastic logic. In after years, Erasmus deprecated the attachment of Cambridge pedants to Aristotle and their unreadiness to accept the new learning. Cambridge never was quite so famous a nursery of schoolmen as Oxford; her history is somewhat more peaceful. Nor, when the medieval theology fell into discredit, did she produce a teacher with the European fame of Wyclif. Her history, however, has a chronology almost parallel with that of Oxford. Out of the monastic system was evolved the freer life of colleges. Oxford led the way with University and Merton; Cambridge followed with Peterhouse. The college, as distinct from the monastery, was a place of retreat whose aim was learning; the aim of the monastery was self-discipline. It is needless to say that these colleges were established upon a clerical basis: each was a society consisting of a master and a certain number of fellows. Their constitution was that of a public School; the modern undergraduate system was a much later development. The early founders had no idea of a college in the modern sense; a society principally composed of laymen, and a large body of undergraduates who to all intents and purposes are the College. The one link which connects our colleges of to-day with the original foundations is the existence of a college chapel, uniting the various members of the institution for the prime object of the learned society, the glory of God.