Excerpt from On the Origin of Universities: And Academical Degrees Parliament, but the much more important question of the admission of dissenters to Oxford and Cam bridge, and that the discussion was sure to be renewed; and when I considered the very great ignorance of the nature and primitive constitution of the universities, which had been shown on all sides, in and out of parliament, by those who had spoken and those who had written on the subject; it appeared to me, that even this short essay, which, imperfect as it is, I believe to be correct as far as it goes, might give some useful informa tion, and might prevent some mischievous mis takes. In this hope of doing good I made up my mind to publish it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.