Abstract
AN event occurred on Thursday last at Cambridge, not in itself, perhaps, of imposing magnitude, but yet fraught with very important consequences. For this long while back an agitation has been going on with the purpose of making Greek no longer absolutely essential to the Previous Examination (or “Little Go,” as it is popularly called), but of allowing French or German, or both, to be substituted for it at the option of the candidate. As any long-headed man might have foreseen, the genuine scholarship and liberal intelligence of the University are in favour of such a change; but the opposition has been neither feeble nor silent. Discussion has abounded more and more, and “fly-sheets” have fallen like the latter rain. The advocates of the change seem to have been more or less governed by a dislike to many words, and to have had large faith in the merits of their cause; their opponents, on the other hand, appear to have believed in the efficacy of much speaking, and in the effects of arguments drawn from all quarters, and looking all ways; their papers and speeches, all put together, form as pretty a piece of incoherence as may be found in a literary day's march, and would have been a perfect godsend to the great Skepsius when he wrote his famous tract An hominibus mens absit. The reasons indeed for making the change were so clear and cogent that there seemed hardly any hope of its being accomplished. Yet by one of those freaks of fortune which are met with even in the Universities, wisdom prevailed; and by the vote of the Senate on Thursday last, which will, in all probability, be speedily ratified at a second meeting, the student who desires to go out in an “honours” examination henceforth need not at his Little Go scratch up a smattering of bad Greek, if he satisfies his examiner that he possesses a real knowledge of French or German.
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Bad Greek Or Good German?. Nature 6, 97 (1872). https://doi.org/10.1038/006097a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/006097a0