PRELUDE: THE NEW TRIPOSES, 1850

So wrote one candidate, Fenton J.A. Hort, for the first examination, in Lent 1851, for the Natural Sciences Tripos. Another tripos, in moral sciences, also began at the same time, and Hort was a candidate for that too.

The triposes were set up following considerable pressure from within the university and outside it. For a long time there had been a sense of unease at the contrast between the distinguished scholarship and reputation of the university's professors and their detachment from Cambridge's chief intellectual purpose, the gift of a liberal education based upon mathematics and classics to undergraduates, as measured by the Senate House Examination and the Classical Tripos. These two subjects were taught by colleges almost entirely; professors were little concerned with them. Other subjects were not examined; nor were they taught except by the professors. So Whewell's writings on the nature of a university, which expressed the views of so many at Cambridge, were a defence of the dominant position of mathematics and classics within Cambridge, together with an ingenious plan for assured though subordinate places for the natural sciences and the humanities (the ‘moral sciences’) within the examination hierarchy.