secondly, that the study of civil law would be a hindrance to theological studies and promulgations. Thus Honorius III insisted that, while the church did not wish to reject the "docile cooperation of the secular laws," yet since in France and other parts governed by the common law there was no use of the Roman law, and since it was seldom that ecclesiastic suits could not be better settled by use of the canon law, there should be appeals to none other. He accordingly forbade, "under penalty of excommunication * * * any person to employ himself in teaching or learning civil law." As a matter of fact, as suggested by one or two writers, the pontiffs were also influenced not a little by the ostentation and extravagance of the law professors, who by means of practice in the courts were able to indulge in princely habits of living that made numbers of other faculties more or less unhappy. The following from a bull of Honorius III, as quoted by Denifle, would sufficiently indicate this: We have learned with sorrow that, abandoning the study of philosophy, to say nothing of that of theology, the majority of the clergy hasten to the lectures on secular law; and that in the majority of the states no one is chosen by the bishops to occupy positions of diguity and honor or ecclesiastical prebends unless he is either a professor of civil law or an advocate." Further along, having drawn a gloomy picture of the self-denial, privations, and sufferings of those who were giving themselves to philosophy and religion, he adds: "While our advocates, or rather say our devils, covered with purple, mounted on richly caparisoned horses, in the glitter of gold, the whiteness of silver, the splendor of precious stones, their royal vestments reflecting the splendors of the astonished sun, make ostentatious display and give rise to scandal everywhere." It is almost needless to add that Honorius concluded his bull with a sweeping prohibition of all teaching of the civil law. Happily he had enough of worldly wisdom to privately question the result of his prohibition, and hence to add this saving clause: "If, however, the heads of state permit," etc.

Of course the civil law made its way after a struggle with organized forms, and in due course of time won the favor of the church, so that not infrequently it found a welcome at the foot of the papal throne, and even wrung from the heart of Roger Bacon so moving a plaint as this in the writing of his Compendium Philosophiæ: "The jurists have acquired such influence over the minds of prelates and princes that they monopolize all places and favors at their disposal, so much so that students of philosophy and theology remain emptyhanded, no longer having the wherewithal to live, to buy books, to devote themselves to research, or to experiment on the secrets of science. The civil lawyers alone are honored and enriched."

*

A little later still the sentiment of the church had been so far liberalized that Pope Clement V himself at the inauguration of legal studies in the University of Orleans in 1306 delivered himself of this glowing eulogy upon the law and upon the jurists he had in mind: "Let none wonder that the sun glistens on their golden bucklers, for they are the defenders of the country; they disentangle rights from the midst of the most hidden facts; they reestablish the rights of man and come to the aid of the human race, thus meriting by the results of their science as much as if they had saved their country by wounds received in combat."

(2) The canon law. Nevertheless the University of Paris was destined to remain an exception to the teaching of both civil and the canon law in the same institution. The civil law made a modest beginning, but very soon the faculty became exclusively the faculty of canon law, faculty of decrees, or faculty of decretal-all meaning the same department.

The last named was entirely appropriate, for the was almost the only, and certainly the chief, authority.

Decretum of Gratian
Works supplementary

to it, such as the collection in the five volumes by Raymond de Penaforte, brought out in 1234, by the Dominican order, of which he was chief, under the title of Decretals of Gregory IX, or Extra; a sixth book added by Boniface VIII under the name Sexta; and the work known as Clementines, because it embraced the letters of Clement V, published in 1313. Doubtless there were others.

The course of study and teaching methods were substantially those of Bologna, and the same was true of the period, which was six years, or fortyeight months of work spread over the period of seventy-two months, which provision, coupled with the extra thirty-four holidays annually accorded to this faculty over and above the sixty days allowed to all in common, gave the canonists a tolerably easy time. Still, if we make account of the great number of discussions, disputations, and sermons included in the course, for an earnest student, anxious to fit himself thoroughly for the mission to which he had connected himself, there was work enough to be done.

Unfortunately, however, the proportion of this sort of students was not very large-not so large, strange to say, as in other faculties, if the statements of the best authorities known to us are to be credited. Father Denifle, for some unaccountable reason, says little about it, but others who have written on the subject appear to have but one opinion. For example, Bulæus calls attention to the important fact that the teaching was largely done by bachelors rather than by professors. Compayré also says the professors came to consider the doctorate as a sinecure and so intrusted the work of instruction to bachelors in their stead. Rashdall declares that too many of the students in this faculty were men with whom the attractions of the capital and the ecclesiastical influence of its university were recommendations which far outweighed the scientific superiority of the great provincial schools, and that it was to the faculty of decrees that the great mass of the well-born, well-beneficed, or wealthy idlers of the university belonged, whether their object was to get on in the world and attain high preferment in the church or merely to pass their time pleasantly in a university town. Worse still, he insists that it is more especially with reference to this faculty that we constantly meet with legislation against froward students and even against bribery and corruption in the purchase of degrees or dispensations from the prescribed conditions for obtaining them; that the intentional overestimation of the "bursa" (weekly expenses by which the dues payable to the faculty were regulated) was a common means of corruption; and he concludes with saying: "In short, it is pretty clear that it was almost as easy to buy a Paris degree in canon law as it is, or was till very lately, to buy the title of doctor from certain American universities, though the tariff was much higher and the forms of residence, study, and examination less sweepingly dispensed with. The presents and fees paid by candidates made the position of regent in this faculty a lucrative privilege, which its possessors naturally sought to convert into a monopoly."

Thurot is yet more severe, if possible, saying: "The faculty of decretal was the most corrupt and venal of all the faculties; it had neither masters nor students; it had only sellers and buyers."

This picture would be somber enough if but half true. But it should be viewed from the standpoint of the shadowy period to which it pertained, not from that of the present day, and without entire forgetfulness of the darker side of the present, since even we of the twentieth century have but little to congratulate ourselves upon. There has always been a broad enough gulf between religion and religious pretension, and it is to be feared that there always will be. With all its faults and shortcomings, this same faculty of the canon law may nevertheless be credited with a helpful part in gaining for the faculty of ED 1904 M-35

theology and for the university at large that remarkable influence which made it in time not only a leading intellectual center, as well as a force in affairs both social and political, but also a guiding and for the most part healthful influence, if not indeed at times a sort of supreme council and court of last resort for the Universal Church.

IV. THE MEDICAL FACULTY.

While there were many famous medical practitioners and medical authors in Egypt, Greece, and Arabia in ancient times, we hear of no medical schools until that of Salerno, in Italy. In the eleventh century it became a public school and took a new start under the inspiration and guidance of the renowned Constantinus Africanus, very much as the school at Bologna afterwards did under the impulse and direction of Irnerius. He produced the earliest Latin revision of Arabian authors, having first traveled widely in the East, studied at Babylon, visited Egypt, and practiced his profession at Carthage.

After a century or so, there followed other schools of medicine in the West, the first and most important being those of Cordova and Montpellier. Both of these were Saracenic in their origin and gave due prominence to Avicenna and Averroes, while they also honored Hippocrates and Galen.

Montpellier became at length the leading medical school of the world, so that "popes and kings summoned its masters to come and heal them." The first of its statutes were drawn up by Cardinal Conrad, the Pope's legate, in 1220, and, according to Fournier, others followed at intervals of twenty and one hundred years. But in these first statutes the Cardinal made eulogistic reference to the past achievements and services of the institution. The location was deemed fortunate, in that from an early date it had been a rendezvous for both Saracen and Christian merchants, who were naturally followed by learned men, including many Jewish and Spanish Saracens seeking the security and quiet afforded by the liberal laws and friendly manners of its people. Compayré says: “It was Montpellier that Charles VI, in his letters patent of 1396, called the source (fons originalis) of medical science. It was a professor of Montpellier, Guy de Chauliac, who published in the fourteenth century (1363) his Grande Chirurgie, of which Victor Leclerc has said, It marked a notable progress in studies based on the observation of nature."

I have said these things of Salerno, and more especially of Montpellier, by way of explaining, in good part, the secondary rank only, in the great medical field, to which the faculty of medicine in the University of Paris actually attained. Having little hope of transcending, or even equaling, the already famous Montpellier, the university professors at Paris were less ambitious, and hence less thorough and less original, and the university as a body sharing this conviction, would the more easily satisfy themselves with a medical department sufficiently important to give a recognized as well as actual completion to an institution the purpose of whose founders had been that very early in its record no faculty or department should be wanting. Besides which there was the old reason, outweighing all others, that theology was to be supreme at Paris.

After no little effort to reach and utilize all available sources of information upon conditions of admission, terms of study in order to obtain degrees, courses of study, authorities relied on, the work of professors, examinations, degrees, and so on, so little has been found that it will be necessary to assume the general accordance between the Paris University faculty and the contemporary schools of medicine, and hence in some matters to report their requirements and usages instead, especially those of the other and greater French school at Montpellier.

It would appear, then, if we are to accept the accounts of Fournier, Crévier, Compayré, and other French authorities—

(1) That, in the statutory conditions of admission, there was such recognition of the value of preparatory studies in the arts as made it necessary to spend at least a year's time more in the medical studies if unlicensed in the arts than otherwise, and that the full period necessary to the degree was nine years, of which term three years (each having eight months of study and attendance upon lectures) were requisite to an examination for the bachelor's degree and the remaining six for the doctorate.

(2) That the lectures were of both grades, ordinary and cursory; and to a large degree they consisted of literal interpretations of old writings, deemed next to sacred, with very little account of recent and present experience, and still less in the way of demonstration in the departments of chemistry, botany, and anatomy, or in practice, whether medical, distinctly speaking, or surgical. Even the Montpellier statutes of 1340 prohibited the use of any book of natural science other than De Animalibus.

(3) That the "old writings" referred to were, of course, first of all those of Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, Averroes, and Constantine. But, according to Rashdall, the books prescribed at Paris were the Liber Tegni of Galen, the Greek; the works of Theophilus, the Byzantine; of the Jewish physician, Isaac; those of Nicholas, the distinguished physician of Salerno; and those of Ægidius, the no less distinguished physician of Paris, especially his Theoretica and his Practica.

(4) That the spirit of the faculty of medicine finally became scholastic, and even political, to a degree that seriously interfered with the work and practical usefulness of what should have been a thoroughgoing scientific school. Thurot says: "It attached much more importance to disputations than to lessons.” And to this Compayré adds:

The ordinary disputations took place every Monday and Thursday from All Saints' Day until Lent-that is, during three or four months. In addition to these there was one disputation more formal than the others, called quodlibetaire, because it might relate indifferently to any subject, and each master was obliged to take part, in turn, under penalty of deposition. The supreme end to be attained was, not the acquirement of positive knowledge, but skill in dialectic. The idea that man is made to reason, to be a perpetual dialectician, even in medicine, dominated the human mind, and people seemed to think that syllogisms were good for everything, even disease.

The same author, while generously shielding the medical schools of those times on the ground that science had found little development, that hygiene was a division of medicine hardly dreamed of, and while also half excusing the medical practitioners because the general system of study then "rendered them more apt at distinguishing the premises and consequences of a train of reasoning than in diagnosing disease, more skillful in managing an argument than in handling the scalpel and the bistoury," nevertheless admits to his pages with apparent relish the extravagant raillery of Petrarch, in his letter to Boccaccio, wherein he says of the doctors of his day:

*

They never appear in public without being superbly dressed, mounted on magnificent horses, and wearing golden spurs. Next thing you know they will arrogate the honors of a triumph; and, in fact, they deserve it; for there is not one among them who has not killed at least 5,000 men, and that is the number required to entitle one to these honors.

The great hindrances to the progress of medicine as a science in those times were, first, the nonacceptance of the truth that for the most part, to say the least, the universe and man are subject to law, natural and divine, and, secondly, a consequent full committal to the doctrine of divine interference, no less ready and perpetual than arbitrary, and without warrant in reason or justice.

V.-HELPS TOWARD DEVELOPMENT.

Among the many helps toward university development at Paris, it seems proper to mention, first, such as were most direct and may be accounted as privileges-those accorded by the church, state, and municipality.

I. PART OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.

I name the church first because it fairly entitled itself to that place of honor from every point of view-as originator, promoter, guide, and defender. At Bologna the central idea was jurisprudence, and it was the state, accordingly, that became the first and chief helper of her university in making itself foremost of all in that great department of human interests. But at Paris, for the many reasons already mentioned, the leading part in the university mission was assumed by the church, as being distinctively formed and maintained in the interest of those spiritual concerns which, while the most important of all, are by their very nature and the nature of man ever and everywhere most in danger of neglect.

And well did the church perform her part; availing herself, first of all, of the interest in the higher learning awakened among the people of all Europe by that most zealous and most brilliant, if not, indeed, most learned of her many gifted sons, Peter Abelard; utilizing the ancient and most important of her arts schools then existing, the cathedral school of Paris, under that other able and learned educator, William of Champeaux; and beginning right there, at the best suited and most attractive of European centers, an institution which should become at once her own source of encouragement, guidance, and defense in all matters of religious faith, and the world's supreme authority in the whole field of science, arts, and letters.

Whether one finds himself in accord with the doctrine of the Catholic Church or not, he is compelled by the facts of history to acknowledge that, but for its professed interest, watchful care, and generous sacrifices of many kinds, coupled with the immense influence it wielded among kings and princes, as well as in the world at large, the University of Paris could not then and might never have gained for itself so important a place in the world.

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At Paris, as elsewhere during the middle ages, the schools were nearly all under the management of ecclesiastics, and those undertaking the work of teaching came at once under the paternal care of the Holy See, sharing by common consent the many privileges and helps already enjoyed by the religious orders and by the most favored officers and members of the great church at large. And this meant a good deal, for, according to Gibbon, whose records are generally beyond challenge, the whole body of the Catholic clergy was exempted from all service, private or public, all municipal offices, and all personal taxes and contributions which pressed their fellow-citizens with intolerable weight, and the duties of their holy profession were accepted as a full discharge of their obligations to the Republic." And all these immunities heretofore exclusively enjoyed by ecclesiastics were now not only extended to the university as an organization and to its officers and teachers, but even to all students and other persons over whom the institution exercised a maternal care. It was Pope Celestine III who, almost before the cathedral school had been thought of very generally as a nucleus for a university, decreed that “for clerics residing in Paris all suits relative to money matters should be tried before ecclesiastical, and not before secular, judges," even as Gregory IX, in confirming the foundation of the University of Toulouse in 1233, decreed that neither masters nor scholars, clerics nor domestics, should be judged by a layman; and as the legate of the Holy See gave to Montpellier statutes, in 1220,