considered inferior to those in arts. To begin with, grammar was only studied for three years, arts for seven; grammar made the clerk, arts the professor. The introduction of the "new art," Aristotle's
analytical logic, increased the importance of the second member of the _trivium_: the name of Aristotle was a name to conjure with, but no new texts came to light to add lustre to the acquirements of the classical grammarian. As to the third member of the _trivium_, public rhetoric lectures were delivered in Cambridge by George Herbert (1620); but a century later Steele complains that both universities are "dumb in the study of eloquence." There were still however rhetoric lectures in the xviii century, but they were not about rhetoric, and the public declamations in the senate house must be regarded as the last homage to this most ancient of arts, whose modern successor is the Union debating society.
[Sidenote: The three liberal or learned faculties.]
If the original Cambridge schools were grammar schools after the pattern of Orléans and Bury-St.-Edmund's, then the introduction of the arts faculty--the trivium and quadrivium--was the first step towards the formation of a _universitas_; and its appearance in the xii century would account for the university status of Cambridge in the opening years of the xiii century.[272] The first of the three learned faculties to take its place in the university was divinity, and with the rise of the earliest colleges provision was made for the study of the two faculties of theology and law. The faculty of medicine was the last to gain a footing. Cambridge never became famous as a school of any of the faculties in the sense in which Paris represented divinity, Bologna law, Montpellier medicine. The study of the civil and canon law was, however, prominent in the xv and early xvi centuries, but was shorn of its ecclesiastical moiety during the chancellorship of Thomas Cromwell when Peter Lombard and Gratian were banished the Cambridge schools.[273] Of the two universities Cambridge alone retains a recognition of canon law in the title of its bachelors masters and doctors of laws, _LL.B._, _LL.M._, and _LL.D._, a title commuted at Oxford into 'bachelor and doctor of civil law,' _B.C.L._ and _D.C.L._ The medical progress of the early xvi century which had been marked by the foundation in 1518 of the Royal College of Physicians reached Cambridge by means of two great men, Linacre from Oxford and its own distinguished son John Caius. Peterhouse had been the first college to admit medical studies, but our naturalists and physicians of later times, not content with the fare provided for them in England, took their degrees at the continental schools. Medicine, the last to obtain recognition, is now the most prominent representative of the learned faculties at Cambridge. Until 1874 when a theological tripos was formed, admitting to a degree in that subject only, theology was studied as part of the mathematical tripos. Law was taken as an additional subject, and degrees in divinity and law were proceeded to separately, as now. Satisfying the examiners in the theological, law, or natural sciences tripos does not admit the student to any but the arts degree. Medical students need not, however, graduate in arts, but may proceed at once, after taking the Previous Examination, to read for the _M.B._ degree.[274] In addition they must keep an "act," which consists in reading a thesis previously approved by the Regius Professor of Physic. Having read the thesis (of which public notice is given) in the schools, the candidate is orally examined by the presiding Regius Professor of Physic. After this he becomes an _M.B._[275]