The last ten years have formed a remarkable period in the history of the ancient and honored University of Oxford. Guided by wise and discerning counsels, it has made rapid and substantial advance. The scope of its studies has been greatly enlarged, the standard of its requirements raised. Its traditionary adherence to old methods and its bigoted conservatism have been overcome, and with happy pliancy it has yielded to the demands of the times and adapted itself to the new desires and growing needs of men. Its aristocratic prejudices have not been allowed longer to confine its privileges and its operations to one class alone of the community,--and in identifying itself with the system of middle-class education, Oxford has won new claims to gratitude and to respect, and now exercises a wider and more confirmed authority over the thought of England than ever before. To us, who take pride in her ancient fame, who honor her long and memorable services in the cause of good learning, who cherish the memory of the great and good men, the masters of modern thought, whom she has nurtured, who recall the names of our own forefathers who came out from her and from her sister University with will and power to lay the foundations of our state, and whom, by her discipline, in the midst of all the refinement of hooks and the quietness of study, she had prepared to meet and to overcome the hardships of exile, poverty, and labor, in the cause of truth and freedom,--to us it may well be matter of rejoicing to witness the freshness of her spirit and the spring of her perennial youth,--to see her "so famous, So excellent in art, and still so rising." One of the most marked features of the advance that has lately been made is the full recognition of the Natural Sciences as forming an essential part of the scheme of University studies. For centuries there had been an "intellectual onesidedness" at Oxford. It had chiefly cultivated classic learning. But it has now undertaken to repair the deficiency that existed in this respect, and, while still retaining all its classic studies, it has added to them a full course of training in the knowledge of Nature. "Our object is," says Dr. Acland, speaking as one of the professors of the University, "our object is,--first, to give the learner a general view of the planet on which he lives, of its constituent parts, and of the relation which it occupies as a world among worlds; and secondly, to enable him to study, in the most complete scientific manner, and for any purpose, any detailed portion which his powers qualify him to grasp."