The enclosed Report on the Smith’s Prize Examination will be discussed at the same time.

I will consider what is best to be done on the subject to which your note refers, without delay.  With many thanks,

I am,
Very faithfully yours,
H.W.  COOKSON,

The Astronomer Royal.

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In this year certain Members of the Senate of the University of Cambridge petitioned Parliament against the abolition of religious declarations required of persons admitted to Fellowships or proceeding to the degree of M.A.  The document was sent to Airy for his signature, and his reply was as follows: 

ROYAL OBSERVATORY, GREENWICH,
LONDON, S.E.
1868, March 18.

MY DEAR SIR,

Though I sympathize to a great extent with the prayer of the petition to Parliament which you sent to me yesterday, and assent to most of the reasons, I do not attach my signature to it, for the following considerations: 

1.  I understand, from the introductory clause, and from the unqualified character of the phrase “any such measures” in the second clause, that the petition objects to granting the M.A. degree without religious declaration.  I do not see any adequate necessity for this objection, and I cannot join in it.

2.  It appears to me that the Colleges were intended for two collateral objects:—­instruction by part of the Fellows, on a religious basis; and support of certain Fellows for scientific purposes, without the same ostentatious connection with religion.  I like this spirit well, and should be glad to maintain it.

3.  I therefore think (as I have publicly stated before) that the Master of the College ought to be in holy orders; and so ought those of the Fellows who may be expected to be usually resident and to take continuous part in the instruction.  But there are many who, upon taking a fellowship, at once lay aside all thoughts of this:  and I think that such persons ought not to be trammelled with declarations.

4.  My modification of existing regulations, if it once got into shape, would I dare say be but a small fraction of that proposed by the “measures in contemplation.”  Still I do not like to join in unqualified resistance to interference in the affairs of the Established Colleges, with that generality of opposition to interference which the petition seems to intimate.

I agree with articles 3, 4, and 5; and I am pleased with the graceful allusion in article 4 to the assistance which has been rendered by the Colleges, and by none perhaps so honourably as Trinity, to the parishes connected with it.  And I could much wish that the spirit of 3 and 5 could be carried out, with some concession to my ideas in my paragraph 3, above.

I am, my dear Sir,
Yours very truly,
G.B.  AIRY.

Rev. Dr Lightfoot.

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