canon law practised in the ecclesiastical courts and, as Roman, misliked by the patriotic Parliament. Philosophy complained that it had to trudge afoot while the liegemen of Justinian rode high in the car of preferment. Of physical science the hour was not yet come, but before its hour came its wonderful and almost miraculous precursor, Roger Bacon, who anticipated the invention of gunpowder and the telescope, and whose fabled study stood over Folly Bridge, till, with Carfax's monument and Cranmer's prison, it was cleared away by an improving city corporation. Roger Bacon was, of course, taken for a dealer in black arts; an astrologer and an alchemist he was, and at the same time an illustrious example of the service indirectly rendered by astrology and alchemy in luring to an investigation of nature which led to real discoveries, just as Columbus, seeking a western passage to the golden cities of the East, discovered America. * * * * * All the Universities belonged not to one nation but to Latin Christendom, the educated population of which circulated among them. At one time there was a migration to Oxford from the University of Paris, which had got into trouble with the government. Of all the Universities alike, ecclesiastical Latin was the language. The scholars all ranked with the clerical order, so that at Oxford, scholar and clerk, townsman and layman, were convertible terms. In those days all intellectual callings, and even the higher mechanical arts, were clerical. The student was exempted by his tonsure from lay jurisdiction. The Papacy anxiously claimed the Universities as parts of its realm, and only degrees granted by the Pope's authority were current throughout Christendom. When, with Edward III., came the long war between England and France, and when the confederation of Latin Christendom was beginning to break up, the English Universities grew more national. * * * * *