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.

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.