In the universities of Southern Europe it is still the custom for boys to graduate with the degree of A. B. at the age of 15 to 16, which supposes attendance at the university, or its equivalent in under-graduate courses, at the age of 12 or even less. There is no need, however, to appeal to the precociousness of the southern nations in explanation of this, since there are some good examples of it in comparatively recent times here in America. Most of the colleges in this country, in the early part of the nineteenth century and the end of the eighteenth, graduated young men of 16 and 17 and thought that they were accomplishing a good purpose, in allowing them to get at their life work in early manhood. Many of the distinguished divines who made names in educational work are famous for their early graduations. Dr. Benjamin Rush, of Philadelphia, whom the medical profession of this country hails as the Father of American Medicine, graduated at Princeton at 15. He must have begun his college course, therefore, about the age of 12. This may be considered inadvisable in our generation, but, it must be remembered that there are many even in our day, who think that our college men are allowed to get at their life-work somewhat too late for their own good. It must be emphasized, moreover, that in many of the university towns there were also preparatory schools. Courses {26} were not regularly organized until well on in the Thirteenth Century, but younger brothers and friends of students as well as of professors would not infrequently be placed under their care and thus be enabled to receive their preparation for university work. At Paris, Robert Sorbonne founded a preparatory school for that institution under the name of the College of Calvi. Other colleges of this kind also existed in Paris. This custom of having a preparatory school in association with the university has not been abandoned even in our own day, and it has some decided advantages from an educational standpoint, though perhaps these are not enough to balance certain ethical disadvantages almost sure to attach to such a system, disadvantages which ultimately led in the Middle Ages to the prohibition that young students should be taken at the universities under any pretext.