It will be interesting, then, to trace the story of the old mediaeval universities as far as the science in their curriculum was concerned, because it represents much more closely than we might have imagined, or than is ordinarily thought, the preceding phase of education to the classical period which we have seen go out of fashion to so great an extent in the last two generations. We shall readily find that at least as much time was devoted in the mediaeval universities to the physical sciences as in our own, and that the culture sciences filled up the rest of the curriculum. Philosophy, which occupied so prominent a place in older university life, was not only a culture science, but physical science as well, as indeed the name natural philosophy, which remained almost down to our day, attests. Physical science was not the sole object of these mediaeval institutions of learning, but they were thoroughly scientific. The main object of the universities in the olden time was to secure such {107} discussion of the problems of man's relation to the universe, to his Creator, to his fellow-creatures and to the material world as would enable him to appreciate his rights and duties and to use his powers. Huxley declared that the trivium and quadrivium, the seven liberal arts studied in the mediaeval universities, probably demonstrate a clearer and more generous comprehension of what is meant by culture than the curriculum of any modern university. Language was learned through grammar, the science of language. Reasoning was learned through logic, the science of reasoning; the art of expression through rhetoric, a combination of art and science with applications to practical life. Mathematics was studied with a zeal and a success that only those who know the history of mediaeval mathematics can at all appreciate. Cantor, the German historian of mathematics, in hundreds of pages of a large volume, has told the story of the development of mathematics during the centuries before the Renaissance, that is from the thirteenth to the fifteenth, in a way that makes it very clear that the teaching at the universities in this subject was not dry and sterile, but eminently productive, successful in research, and with constant additions to knowledge such as live universities ought to make.