The rise of the experimental method in Oxford : being the ninth Robert Boyle lecture delivered before the Oxford University Junior Scientific Club on May 13, 1902 / by Clifford Allbutt.

  • Allbutt, T. Clifford (Thomas Clifford), 1836-1925.
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The rise of the experimental method in Oxford : being the ninth Robert Boyle lecture delivered before the Oxford University Junior Scientific Club on May 13, 1902 / by Clifford Allbutt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    9/59 (page 6)
    schools of Oxford and Cambridge. These Universities arose not in coastward ports and towns, such as London, Colchester, Lynn, or even Lincoln, great school as it was in the thirteenth century; nor again in upland cities such as Winchester; but under the shadow of fortresses commanding the head waters of eastward rivers where, while access to the outer world was easy, traffic pene- trated far inland. Oxford was a great political city, often a royal residence ; its trade was extensive and, as things went, peaceful: Cambridge commanded the gates of Mercia, and its fair (Stourbridge), confirmed by charter of King John, was the greatest fair in England, perhaps the greatest in Western Europe. Moreover as the Oxford school wisely kept clear of bishop and monk, so those who settled in Cambridge squatted just without the grip of Ely. Oxford, the courtly city, a centre of public affairs, became the picturesque strong- hold of hierarchical traditions ; while Cambridge, happy in having no early history, was let alone to develop ‘its Whiggism, and its mathematical school.’ When, in the interests of Rome, James II brutally harried Oxford, Cambridge was, comparatively speaking, unhurt; yet Oxford—engrained in its submission to authority in Church and State—was nevertheless still hotly Jacobite in the rising of Forty-five. For like reasons Oxford sprang more sudden^’’ than Cambridge into fame; scarcely had European scholars begun to gather there at the opening of the thirteenth century when it grew rapidly into one of the largest schools in the world; chiefly, as it would appear, on the scholastic side, under the influence of the Friars Minors. The Franciscans settled in Oxford in 1224, the Dominicans had preceded them in 1221. In these