The present article originated out of an attempt to re-edit the letters of Gilbert Foliot, whose career as abbot of Gloucester, bishop of Hereford, and bishop of London covered nearly half of the twelfth century (1139-87). The edition by J. A. Giles is thoroughly unsatisfactory: the text is un-trustworthy, there is no index, and no attempt has been made to date the letters or to arrange them in any coherent order. Nothing could be done at present about the text, since the necessary manuscripts could not be consulted; but it was possible to make an index and with its assistance to arrange the letters in some sort of order and assign to them approximate dates. The chief clues for dating are naturally the names of persons, usually ecclesiastics, mentioned in the letters, but it soon became evident that the only lists available of these ecclesiastics (other than bishops) are for the most part entirely unreliable, and that a complete revision of these lists is a necessary preliminary to any attempt at precise dating, not only of these letters, but also of twelfth-century documents in general. In the thirteenth century, when Patent and Close Rolls begin, there is more positive information, and still more when episcopal registers become available. Before that time, documents were rarely dated, and appointments and deaths of minor officials were not important enough to receive much notice from chroniclers. It is for this early period, when references have to be collected from a number of scattered sources and exact dates are rare, that revision is most needed, and to it we are confining our investigation.

It will soon be half a century since the Cambridge Modern History was planned: the first entry relating to it in the minutes of the Syndics of the University Press is dated 13 March 1896. It is forty-three years since the first volume was published, and throughout that time the history has held its own as one of the indispensable books. It was the parent of all the other Cambridge Histories, of which there are eight series down to the present time. No other modern general history on anything like the same scale has been written or even projected in the English language, and this is a testimony not only to its usefulness but also to the efficiency of those who produced it. The time from the publication of the first volume to that of the last, the Atlas, was only ten years; and perhaps only those who have been concerned in similar enterprises can tell what energy and competence that implies. There were 160 contributors. Some of them, though it seems not so many as twenty, are happily still living and working; but they would probably agree that the Cambridge Modern History, taken as a whole, is a monument of a stage in English historical studies which may now be regarded not unfairly as a past stage.

The editor of the portion of D'Ewes's Journal that covers the period from the first recess of the Long Parliament to the withdrawal of the King from London has added one more tribute to the historical work of S. R. Gardiner. Fresh from the study of the sources for the four months with which he is concerned, he declares, ‘Gardiner's narrative for this period is on the whole unassailable.’ In noting, however, that the biographers of Pym and of Hyde have neglected the analysis of their parliamentary tactics, Professor Coates suggests that ‘such an investigation would reveal in Hyde a statesmanship, albeit unavailing, somewhat superior to that with which Gardiner credits him’. In making the suggestion, he defines Hyde's aim as follows: ‘to mould Royalist sentiment out of the conservative spirit which emerged in Parliament after ten months of unremitting activity and a few weeks of religious disorders’. It is clear, therefore, that, though he thinks Gardiner has underestimated Hyde's political ability, he does not question Gardiner's interpretation of his political objectives.

The seventeenth century was one of the twelve during which, in spite of what geographers might regard as probable and proper, the two sides of the Mediterranean were in the hands of two separate and inimical civilizations, different in religion, morals, law, economy and knowledge. That sea was nevertheless a busy highway. The Levant trade, the most important of all for the French and the Italians, was also important for the English and the Dutch; but North Africa, from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the Libyan desert, Barbary par excellence, was outside the European system of international law and conduct. Even when they were nominally at peace the Christians and the Moslems never trusted one another or succeeded for long in abiding by the rules on which they agreed. Both sides tried to enforce such rules by collective and vicarious punishments, by reprisals and by other devices to which men resort when there is no law between them. Each side, often in spite of express treaty stipulations, made slaves of prisoners from the other: the Islamic society was based on slavery, and the Latin states also manned their war-galleys partly with their own criminals but largely with Moslems captured at sea. To the seafaring men of Europe captivity in Barbary was a danger worse than shipwreck.

The odious behaviour of the Romans in the events that led to the destruction of Carthage has earned the condemnation of historians who see in it, as they have a right to do, a moral issue. The unattractiveness of the Carthaginians, whose history has been written for us by their enemies, is no defence: the bad name does not justify this execution. But the problem remains why the Senate acted as it did, and the examination of it may throw light on Roman policy and the temper of the Roman mind in the middle years of the second century. We need not suppose that the Senate decided to destroy Carthage rather than listen any longer to Cato ending all his sententiae in the Curia with the words ‘ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam’. The motives that led Cato, who after Pydna had spoken up for the Rhodians and apparently had quoted with approval a plea of Scipio Africanus against the destruction of Carthage after Zama, to urge the destruction of Carthage axe part of the investigation. But the main question is why the Senate in the end adopted his policy, if policy it can be called.

I have been asked to speak to-day on the ‘new philosophy’ which arose and gradually triumphed in the period between the birth of Bruno in 1548 and the death of Descartes in 1650. I propose to put a fairly wide interpretation on the word ‘philosophy’, as did all the great thinkers of our period. And I propose to begin by giving a fairly full, though necessarily very imperfect, synopsis of the old philosophy against which the new doctrines reacted and which they superseded. What I shall describe with the name of the ‘old philosophy’ is the theory of the universe which St Thomas had elaborated on the basis of such knowledge of the works of Aristotle as was available to him.

In ‘The Sentiments of a Church of England Man’, written in 1708, Swift offered to the whig party (then entering into power thanks to the exigencies of the Spanish Succession war) a piece of advice which they would have been well advised to regard despite the suspected allegiance of the writer.

There is no stronger proof of the stability of the Empire which Charles V and Philip II had built, and of the vitality of the monarchic idea in the seventeenth century, than the ability of the Spanish Monarchy to survive the crisis of the years 1647 and 1648. In a dispatch to his Senate the Venetian ambassador in Madrid characterized Spain's history in those years as a string of disasters: Portugal and Catalonia in open revolt; Andalusia in the grip of corruption owing to the treachery of the Duke of Medina Sidonia; the East Indies with Brazil (a country large enough for four kingdoms) lost with Portugal; the West Indies hard-pressed by the Dutch; the royal revenues mortgaged, credit extinct; friends become enemies or vacillating neutrals, and the Government abandoned to the inexperience of a new favourite. Thus the Spanish Monarchy resembled that great colossus which for many years had been the wonder of the world and which during an earthquake had collapsed in a few moments while every one hurried along to enrich himself with the fragments.

The revolution by which the municipal government of Cambridge was in the decade 1780-90 transformed from an oligarchy to a dictatorship has this in common with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, that it was made possible by the absence of a written constitution; but whereas it is impossible, as Maitland has said, by any stretch of ingenuity to make the Revolution of 1688-9 a perfectly legal act, the processes of constitutional change at Cambridge a century later were again and again submitted to the scrutiny of the courts. Indeed, Newling v. Francis, the judgement in which finally established the right of the corporation to revise its own constitution, may be described as a leading case in the law of corporations.

I have been asked to speak about the history of the experimental method in medicine, with particular reference to the nineteenth century. This indication, though I do not propose to regard it as setting a limit, seems to have a special fitness, since it is to the nineteenth century, and especially to its latter half, that we must look for the effective beginning and astonishingly rapid development, the veritable outburst, indeed, of activity in the application of the experimental method to medicine, which opened the new era of medical progress in which we are living today. It is curious, perhaps, that this should have come so late in the history of science. For medicine had figured early in man's attempts to understand nature and his relation to it, and many departments of science which have long ago achieved recognition as independent bodies of knowledge originated as aspects of the physician's equipment—botany, for example, zoology and chemistry, as well as human anatomy and physiology, which still retain their attachment to the medical group of the scientific disciplines. From this point of view, then, it is not surprising to find two physicians, William Gilbert and William Harvey, as the leaders in this country of the scientific revolution which had begun in Europe in 1543 with the publication, within a few weeks of one another, of two books—one by Copernicus of Cracow, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, and the other by Vesalius of Padua, De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Both Gilbert and Harvey, we may be proud to remember, studied and first graduated in Medicine here, in Cambridge.