Nothing could well be less true than the impression that philosophy and theology were the exclusive subjects of the medieval university curriculum. If because our modern universities devote a great amount of time to physical science in its various forms, and more of their publications concern this department of educational work than any other, it were to be said by some future generation that our universities occupied themselves {304} with nothing but physical science, it would be much more true than the expressions which stamp medieval university teaching as limited to dialectics and metaphysics. Besides science in the modern universities, philosophy in all its branches is the subject of ardent devotion, and the classics and languages are not neglected, and medicine and law are important post-graduate departments, and even theology comes in for a goodly share of attention and occupies the minds of many deep students. In the medieval universities, medicine particularly occupied a very large share of attention; but all the physical sciences were the subject not only of distant curiosity, but of careful investigation, many of them along lines that are supposed to be distinctly modern, yet which are really as old as the university movement. Turner in his History of Philosophy [Footnote 38] summed up the books most commonly used, the method of examination and of conferring degrees, in a way that shows the character of university teaching during the thirteenth century, and brings out not only its thoroughness, but also the fact that a good deal of time was devoted to what we now call physical or natural science, since the treatises on animals, on the earth and on meteors, under which all the phenomena of the Heavens were included, represent almost exactly those questions in physical science that most men who do not intend to devote themselves particularly to science care to know something about at the present time. He says: [Footnote 38: Ginn & Co., Boston and New York, 1903.] "By statutes issued at various times during the thirteenth century, it was provided that the professor should read, that is, expound, the text of certain standard {305} authors in philosophy and theology. In a document published by Denifle (the distinguished authority on medieval universities), and by him referred to the year 1252, we find the following works among those prescribed for the Faculty of Arts: Logica Vetus (the old Boethian text of a portion of the Organon, probably accompanied by Porphyry's Isagoge); Logica Nova (the new translation of the Organon); Gilbert's Liber Sex Principiorum; and Donatus's Barbarismus. A few years later (1255), the following works are prescribed: Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics, De Anima, De Animalibus, De Caelo et Mundo, Meteorica, the minor psychological treatises and some Arabian or Jewish works, such as the Liber de Causis and De Differentia Spiritus et Animae."