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)