Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/164

 156 SHORT NOTICES January correspondence. The second part of Dr. Toynbee's work consists of ' Additions and Corrections ' to Mrs. Toynbee's sixteen volumes. The corrections are comparatively few and for the most part of little impor- tance : the many additions are largely derived from the WaUer collection, and are furnished by entries made by Walpole in various manuscript books and letters to him which he carefully preserved and marked ' for illus- tration ', that is, obviously, to be used by an editor as materials for notes to his own letters. They explain many more or less obscure allusions in the letters, and some of them have an interest of their own. The present volumes have full and carefully compiled indexes and a list of letters known to have existed but now missing, which must have taken much time and trouble to put together. W. H. Sir Francis Piggott's pamphlet, The Freedom of the Setts (Oxford : University Press, 1919), is an historical examination of that elusive doctrine down to 1856. In its modern sense it was first enunciated by the Prussians in the Silesian loan dispute of 1752-3, and the much earlier vogue of the phrase ' mare liberum ' is not dealt with in this treatise. The two main points which it makes are (a) the impossibility of our consenting to forgo belligerent rights in order to enable neutrals to trade actively with our enemies ; (6) the fact that Great Britain never gave up such rights as a principle, whatever concessions she may have made from time to time by treaties with individual states. There is much learning in these pages, but no clear-cut statement of law, and the impres- sions they convey are curiously blurred. For ' Earl Malmesbury ' on p. 42 read ' Earl of Malmesbury '. G. B. H. In his Fitzpatrick lectures on Medicine in England during the Reign of George III Dr. Arnold Chaplin means by * medicine ' pure physic, and the reader will find nothing about the great surgeons. Hunter, Pott, Abernethy, to whom the mind naturally turns when thinking of the healing art at this period ; nor will he get a description of those medical systems, the ' solidism ' of Cullen and the ' Brunonianism ' of Brown, which came from North Britain, and made such a stir in their time. But he will not regret the absence of information readily obtainable elsewhere, since it enables the author to give, in the limits of these lectures, a most interest- ing account of matters hitherto inadequately treated. He begins by describing the state of medicine in the later part of the eighteenth century, the rise and progress of hospitals, dispensaries, societies, and the medical press, and particularly the way in which the Royal College of Physicians recruited its fellows from Oxford and Cambridge, though neither university possessed a medical school. He then tells us something of the work of the more prominent fellows, especially the ' honest pessimist ' Heberden, who despaired of the medical republic in classical Latin, and Baillie, whom he holds to have been a greater man than Bichat or Morgagni. An account is then given of physicians who advanced general science, such as Wells, author of the Essay on Dew, and the first to mention natural selection, and that wonderful genius, Thomas Young, whose fame is so unequal to his achievements and almost overshadowed by that of the author