Sheldonian Theatre Research Articles

There Is a Lot More to Transplantation Surgery Than the Surgery Itself: The "Other" Sir Peter John Morris, AC, FRS.

There Is a Lot More to Transplantation Surgery Than the Surgery Itself: The "Other" Sir Peter John Morris, AC, FRS.

Henry James and Ivan Turgenev: Cosmopolitanism and Croquet

On the morning of his Encaenia at the University of Oxford, Ivan Turgenev woke in Balliol College, breakfasted in Pembroke College, and processed to the Sheldonian Theatre next to the Dean of Christ Church. He was presented for his Doctorate in Civil Law honoris causa as “second to none among the writers of this century,” and was the first novelist ever to receive it from the university.1 He was proudly photographed in the cap and gown for which a public subscription had paid. It was, as his friend and literary admirer Henry James put it, “a very pretty attention to pay him.”2 Two days later, on June 20th, 1879, James added his own attention in the form of a dinner for Turgenev at the Reform Club. This was attended among others by John Walter Cross, who was just about to marry the woman to whom, the year before, Turgenev had deflected Lewes’s description of him as the greatest living novelist.3 Turgenev was probably glad to have the dinner to look forward to, knowing that if things went badly at the Encaenia, his friend James would be sympathetic.

Selling Books from the Sheldonian Theatre 1677-1720

Catalogues were produced from time to time at Oxford by the University Press at the Sheldonian Theatre in the hope of selling good and learned books. In what numbers they were produced is not clear, but it is likely to have been some hundreds of copies in most years between 1694 and 1716. These catalogues must be regarded first in the light of the history of the university press in Oxford in these years; second, in the context of booksellers' catalogues in general. They reveal much about the selling of learned books in Oxford in this period, an account of which is provided, along with a descriptive list of the relevant documents.

Unsettling Stories: Disruptive Narrative Strategies in Marina Warner’s Indigo and the Leto Bundle

Unsettling Stories: Disruptive Narrative Strategies in Marina Warner’s Indigo and the Leto Bundle Lisa G. Propst In her 2002 Amnesty Lecture at the Oxford Sheldonian Theatre, Marina Warner commented that since the 1980s, many women writers had used “Negative Capability” to reconstitute lost histories (Warner, “Who’s Sorry” 467). Keats developed the concept of “Negative Capability” in a letter of 1817 to his brothers. Declaring it the highest literary achievement, he defined it as the ability to remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Keats 72). He elaborated on his idea in a letter of 1818 to Richard Woodhouse: “As to the poetical Character itself...it is not itself–it has no self–it is every thing and nothing....A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity–he is continually...filling some other Body” (Keats 227–28). Warner’s assertion in the Amnesty Lecture implied that writers who recuperated the voices of silenced people put themselves in the place of their subjects and invited readers to identify with them. She praised Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Louise Erdrich for presenting “lost histories and lost strands of courage” with “empathy and imagination,” and she portrayed these writers as models for her own work. Yet she acknowledged that “Negative Capability” has ethical hazards that turn her desire to chronicle lost stories into “a bristling and jagged, intractable problem.” She commented, “History can be lost to view when it’s personified in a suffering subject;” responding to the emotional impact of one person’s story can make it easy to overlook the stories of others and the social structures that led to that person’s suffering (“Who’s Sorry” 467). Accounts of oppression can create an “economy of virtue” as people reap political influence by claiming to identify with oppressed groups: [End Page 330] like pilgrims kissing the wounds of the crucified Christ, contemporary political subjects seek to touch these springs of sympathy, and apologists–by consenting and yielding and admitting wrong–strive to reach the same condition of pathos, and consequently partake in the currency of merit. (“Who’s Sorry” 468–69) Warner implied that like politicians apologizing for injustices that occurred before their time, novelists and readers who empathize with persecuted victims may envision themselves as virtuous and innocent, alleviating their sense of responsibility for conditions that cause suffering. In sharing the pain of people abused or enslaved, readers can fail to recognize the particularities of those people’s experiences or the limited forms of power those people wielded. Writing that helps people put themselves in the shoes of others can paradoxically be divisive. Nevertheless, Warner insisted, “If history is an agreed fable, as Voltaire said...then any initiative to change things must begin with stories” (“Who’s Sorry” 467). Warner’s most recent two novels, Indigo, or, Mapping the Waters (1992) and The Leto Bundle (2001), explore “this writhing problem,” as she calls it (“Who’s Sorry” 479), through formal strategies that invite readers to share the dilemma of how to respond to the lives of silenced people. The novels ask how to imagine the stories of the oppressed without risking false empathy or reducing the nuances of history to allegory. Far from claiming to resolve these questions, Indigo and The Leto Bundle position Warner in a community of writers, including Morrison, Kingston, Caryl Phillips, J. M. Coetzee, and many others, whose formal experiments grapple with the complexities of writing about alienation and otherness. Both novels invite readers into the lives of silenced characters yet persistently call attention to the incompletion of those characters’ representation. Significant elements of the characters’ lives remain untold, and their perspectives on their experiences are often absent. The partial depictions of characters foreground a twofold dilemma. People are irreducible to narratives about their lives. Even in conditions that enable a person to speak and be heard, no one can tell his or her own story fully and unmediated, “as though the tellability of one’s story were a finite, measurable thing” (Newton 16). Moreover, the lives of the historical people who underlie Warner’s characters–for example, the indigenous...

Wren's Preliminary Design for the Sheldonian Theatre

According to Sir Christopher Wren's son, writing many years after the events described, the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford (Figs 1-2) was to have been executed in a greater and better Style, with a View to the ancient Roman Grandeur discernible in the Theatre of Marcellus at Rome; but… [Wren] was obliged to put a Stop to the bolder Strokes of his Pencil, and confine the Expence within the Limits of a private Purse. That purse belonged to Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury and former warden of All Souls College, Oxford, whose willingness to finance the Theatre necessitated the scaling back of the project. Although Wren's initial scheme is currently presumed lost, an unidentified project for a theatre (Fig. 3), today amongst the Wren drawings at All Souls, can be associated with the original design. The drawing, together with newly discovered documents, sheds new and unexpected light on the early history of Wren's first major building.

Documentation: Islam and the West

Abstract This speech was given on Wednesday 27 October 1993 in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, on the occasion of the Prince of Wales' visit to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.

A Community of Scholars: An NEH Summer Fellowship

golden stone of Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre caught the waning rays of sunlight as strains of Handel's Messiah floated out of the open windows across the courtyard to where we stood on Catte Street. It was my first evening in Oxford, and, along with fourteen other English teachers from around the US, I was entering a six-week National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship titled Thomas Hardy and T. S. Eliot: Literature and Landscape. fantasy had begun. usual rewards for secondary teachers are quiet ones-an inspired student, an appreciative parent, a satisfied administrator-but NEH has gone one step further; it provides secondary personnel with the opportunity to become academically refreshed and retooled through fellowships that provide both professional and monetary rewards: the honor of being selected from candidates throughout the country and a stipend to finance travel, room, and board. In 1989, some sixty summer seminars were offered, ranging in subject and location from The Russian Revolution in Memoir Histories in Florida to The ThirteenthCentury 'Lives' of St. Francis of Assisi in Italy-in effect, something for everyone. To be eligible, one had to be a working educator who had not participated in the summer seminars at any time in the three years prior to applying. Once I had agonized over the required three-page essay and filled out the necessary application forms, the result was left to fate.

"O Beloved Kids": Rudyard Kipling's Letters to His Children , and: Robert Louis Stevenson and "The Beach of Falesá": A Study in Victorian Publishing with the Original Text , and: The Imaginary Reminiscences of Sir Max Beerbohm (review)

Reviewed by: "O Beloved Kids": Rudyard Kipling's Letters to His Children, and: Robert Louis Stevenson and "The Beach of Falesá": A Study in Victorian Publishing with the Original Text, and: The Imaginary Reminiscences of Sir Max Beerbohm Hans-Peter Breuer Rudyard Kipling . "O Beloved Kids": Rudyard Kipling's Letters to His Children. Ed. Elliot L. Gilbert. San Diego: Harcourt, 1984. 225 pp. $16.95. Barry Menikoff . Robert Louis Stevenson and "The Beach of Falesá": A Study in Victorian Publishing with the Original Text. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1984. 199 pp. $24.50 Ira Grushow . The Imaginary Reminiscences of Sir Max Beerbohm. AthensOhio U P/Swallow, 1984. 304 pp $28.95. "O Beloved Kids" presents us with the never before published letters of Kipling to his children John and Elsie from 1906 to 1915, the fateful year during which John (whose letters of that year arc also included) was reported missing in the battle of Loos a few weeks after his eighteenth birthday Elliot Gilbert has edited them tastefully and with becoming modesty. In his splendid Introduction he brings a sympathetic understanding to his task as chronicler and to Kipling's deep perplexity—for the letters tell the tale of the cruel diminution of a happy household. Up to 1912 the letters are an utter delight, full of "frivolling," puns, cartoons, and jokes, but our knowledge of John's tragic death invests them with sharp poignancy. They reveal a father who delighted in his children, who loved them genuinely, spoke their language, could, it appears, give readily of himself only to them, it is bitter to realize that such a man was destined to suffer, after the death of his beloved daughter Josephine, both the loss of the son in whom he had invested so many of his hopes and the consolation of grandchildren Gilbert surely is right to claim that with John's death Kipling lost "the magical childhood secret of life" that had inspired his finest writings. His home and family was his haven of "safe delights" that he fortified like a castle against the world raging outside. As Byron Rogers recently pointed out, Kipling was an outsider, in Sussex as much as in Lahore or in Vermont. In the world one had to play the game, but inside his enclosed valley of Bateman's he was among his own, where he was Daddoo to Bird, the old Man, and Mummy, the four of them united in affectionate and unguarded camaraderie. The letters suggest the tone of one who writes to his children as to members of a secret club, at times even like a spy in the world outside reporting to home base of the wonder [End Page 338] and silliness of it all. So he writes that when he entered the crowded Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford to receive an honorary degree, he "looked about and saw Mummy looking very sweet and beautiful and then I didn't mind." And the gowned usher, he explains, who met them at the station, looked rather like "an African parrot." There is no trace of emotional blackmail in the letters; he is never sentimental; he gives stern advice ("To boast is the mark of the Savage and the Pig"), can good naturedly speak of the children as "beastly" but also take their side and consider getting dressed for dinner as "disgusting." As John grew toward manhood the relationship of course had to be modulated: Kipling's letters became more business-like and exhortative. Yet he continued to write as if the family was the place one went out from and came back to. But that enclosed world would be invaded irrevocably by the "bleak inevitability of things" and never again be the safe harbor he had always needed ever since he had been a spoiled sahib in Bombay. From Elsie's testimony we know he bore his despair too stoically, and it not doubt fed the fierce hatred of Germans he poured into his wartime speeches. These biographical documents are further proof that Kipling was a great deal more than steam, patriotism, and moral goodness. Barry Menikoff has rendered a real service in publishing the original version of Stevenson's "The...

“Literary Petty Larceny”: Plagiarism in Oscar Wilde’s Early Poetry

“ L I T E R A R Y P E T T Y L A R C E N Y ” : P L A G I A R I S M IN O S C A R W I L D E ’ S E A R L Y P O E T R Y A V E R IL G ARD N ER Memorial University W h e n , in 1878, Oscar Wilde recited his Newdigate Prize poem, Ravenna, in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, anyone who had read his poems already published in magazines might have felt an odd sense of déjà vu as he listened to some of the lines. In fact, many of them were direct quotations from, or only slightly adapted versions of lines in, earlier poems such as “Magdalen Walks,” “Sonnet on Approaching Italy,” “Urbs Sacra Aetema,” and “Rome Unvisited.” A neat example is provided by three lines near the beginning of Ravenna’s fifth section: Some startled bird, with fluttering wings and fleet, Made snow of all the blossoms; at my feet, Like silver crowns, the pale narcissi lay. . . . If one changes “crowns” into “moons,” these lines are identical with lines 3-6 of “Sonnet Written in Holy Week at Genoa,” published in July 1877. Wilde also made use in Ravenna of lines and phrases to be found in poems written by that time but not yet published, such as “The Grave of Keats,” “The Burden of Itys,” “The Garden of Eros,” and “Impression de Voyage.” In addition to copying himself in individual lines, Wilde adopted through­ out Ravenna a derivative style which entitles one to call the poem “aca­ demic.” The competence of Wilde’s performance is a second-hand compe­ tence; either because he had not yet developed a style of his own, or because he felt that the adjudicators would respond more favourably to one with which they were familiar, he imitates in many places the accents of eight­ eenth-century poetry. This imitation probably came the more easily to him because of the form, pentameter couplets, prescribed by the competition. Many of his couplets are strongly reminiscent, despite the Romantic flavour of the poem as a whole, of Augustan pastoral writing : Where flower and fruit to purple radiance blow, And like bright lamps the fabled apples glow. (21-22) E n g l i s h S t u d i e s in C a n a d a , v ii i, i , March 1982 Some, though they deal in a kind of beauty which particularly appealed to Wilde, display a characteristically Augustan balance of words and phrases: Where the tall tower of Giotto seems to rise A marble lily under sapphire skies. (Section 3) So far, the borrowing revealed is not very reprehensible. One does not look for maturity in Ravenna any more than in Arnold’s Newdigate Prize poem “Cromwell,” or Tennyson’s early poem “Timbuctoo,” with which he won the Chancellor’s Medal at Cambridge. But a more serious charge — that of plagiarism — can be levelled at Poems (1881). When Wilde pre­ sented a copy of this to the Oxford Union, Oliver Elton was able to propose a motion, which was unanimously carried, that “it be not accepted”1 on the grounds that it was no more than a tissue of borrowings from “better known and more deservedly-reputed authors.” The volume is full of echoes, either “atmospheric” or specifically verbal, of earlier English poets, and not only Elton but reviewers in the Athenaeum and in Punch were quick to point out its indebtedness. As the Athenaeum reviewer said: “Imitation of previous writers goes far enough seriously to damage the claim to originality.”2 Wilde’s views about plagiarism appear to be rather confused. About his own borrowings he made two statements. One of these, “ I appropriate only what is already mine,”3 sounds merely high-handed. Its meaning is perhaps clarified by the other, a more considered pronouncement: “The only writers who have influenced me are Keats, Flaubert and Pater, and before I came across them I had already gone halfway to meet them.”4 In the sense that it suggests those writers who influenced...

English Baroque Architecture in Oxford

Baroque is not an adjective that comes to mind when one thinks of Oxford. It is most commonly thought that dreaming spires and cloistered college precincts, so familiar as a touchstone for evocations of University, are medieval, although they are so more through association than fact. Yet there are a surprising number of buildings that play a dominating role in creating prospect of central Oxford that were not to arrive until late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I want to discuss works of this period designed by Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor, two of principal protagonists of English Baroque architecture. Rather than struggling to define stylistic labels, it will be more apposite to look at how some of these buildings fit into Oxford townscape. The view down Broad Street is closed at East end by profile of Old Clarendon Building, and row of Ancients cordoning off back of Sheldonian Theatre. The latter is first work in architectural career of then Dr Christopher Wren. He had been educated at Wadham College, and was a Fellow of All Souls, until appointed Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London, from where he later returned to Oxford in 1661, as Savilian Professor of Astronomy. As leading scientist of day, Wren was an active member of newly formed Royal Society, and it was at one of its meetings in 1663 that he first showed a model of his proposed design for Sheldonian Theatre. Gilbert Sheldon, Bishop of London, was behind idea for a new setting for University ceremonies, which function it serves to this day. The back of building, as visible from Broad Street, contains most of seating from which spectators face flat 'frons'. The richly decorated interior perhaps disguises derivation of lay-out from plan of a Roman theatre. In Robert Streeter's illusionistic ceiling painting, an allegory is revealed, described by a near contemporary as being of the Descent of Arts and Sciences, that are congregated in a circle of clouds, to whose assembly Truth descends, as being solicited, and implored by them all. This painting concealed an example of Wren's practical ingenuity and an application of his skill in geometry, in form of a roof-truss made up of horizontally interlocking beams, which device was needed in order to span ceiling and avoid supporting piers. It seems possible that original intention was to execute fabric along lines of a Roman model's columniated and airy structure, available via sixteenth-century pattern book of Serlio. Nevertheless, economy, if not propriety, dictated a simpler scheme. As it is, facade itself is also borrowed unaltered from one of Serlio's less inspired plates, result of which is not greatly missed as it stands close up to side of Divinity School. Quite different is elevation that runs around rest of building. The variety of wallsurface created by limited inclusion of swags and trophies over rear entrance, cartouches over upper windows, and delicate rustication, is in its effect hardly three-dimensional. This characteristic speaks of a knowledge of French architecture, almost certainly derived from engravings, as construction was well under way when Wren had returned from his visit to France in 1665. The present cupola replaced original in 1838, and provides a welcome panorama after enclosed impression of so many quadrangles and gates. Wren's first 'experiment' in architecture produced a result that would seem to hold little promise. However, it is in its own way an adroit performance: whole is more considerable than sum of its parts. One need not feel that Ancients grimace at what stands behind them: sight of New Bodleian is another matter.

Science and Literature

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE* SIR PETER MEDA WAR\ I I hope I shall not be thought ungracious ifI say at the outset that nothing on earth wouldhave induced me to attend thekind oflecture you may think I am about to give. Science and literature—what a hackneyed subject , you must feel. Must we go into that again? What can there be to say that has not already been very well said by I. A. Richards, Aldous Huxley, C. P. Snow, Martin Green, J. Bronowski, D. G. King-Hele, and half a dozen others [i]? Let me begin with an outline ofsome ofthe things I do not intend to say. I shall say nothing whatsoever about education, and have no formula for compounding science and literature into a single diet; nor shall I say, or even be thinking, that imaginative literature can be regarded as an antidote or counterirritant to science, or vice versa. There will be no readings from poetry written by scientists—not even a quotation or biopsy specimen from the poetry ofGeorgeJohn Romanes, F.R.S. [2]. I shall not declare that henceforward the discoveries, ideas and adventures of science should become a bigger part of the subject matter ofpoetry, as Wordsworth [3] thought they might; nor shall I reproach poets and "magazine critics," as Peacock did [4], with carrying on just as if "there were no such things in existence as mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, moralists , metaphysicians, historians, politicians, and political economists." After these various abjurations, what is there left to say? If I had to choose a motto for this lecture, I should turn a remark ofLowes Dickinson 's upside down. "When science arrives," said Lowes Dickinson [5], "it expels literature"—an echo, perhaps, of Keats's lament that science * The Romanes Lecture, given at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, and published in Encounter (January 1969). t Director, National Institute for Medical Research, London, N.W. 7. 529 unweaves the rainbow and makes a dull ordinariness out ofawful things. The case I shall find evidence for is that when literature arrives, it expels science. There are large territories of human belief and learning upon which both science and literature have very important things to say, for example, social and cultural anthropology, psychology and human behavior generally, and even cosmology. These subjects lie within the compass of literature insofar as they have to do with human hopes, fears, beliefs and motives; with the attempt to give an account of ourselves and investigate our condition; and with matters of general culture, by which I mean the whole pattern of the way in which people think and carry on. The case that can be made for science is that in all these subjects, we have also to work toward a special kind of understanding which, though imaginative in origin (as I shallhope to convince you), is under the censorship or restrictive influence ofa certain kind of obligation toward the truth. The way things are at present, it is simply no good pretending that science and literature represent complementary and mutually sustaining endeavors to reach a common goal. On the contrary, where they might be expected to cooperate, they compete. I regret this very much, don't think it necessary, and wish it were otherwise. We are going through a bad episode in cultural history. We all want to be friends, and one day perhaps we shall be so. "Let us advance together, men of letters and men of science," said Aldous Huxley [6], "further and further into the ever expanding regions ofthe unknown." That is a fine ambition, though most of us will feel awkward at its wording; but ifit is to be achieved, scientists and men of letters must work their way toward an understanding—not just ofeach other's accomplishments (there is mischiefand magnificence in both), nor just of each other's purposes (which are doubtless mixed, though officially both are good), but ofeach other's methods and energizing concepts and the quality and pattern of movement of each other's thought. I want therefore to discuss imagination and criticism as they enter into science on the one hand and into literature on the other; to explain why I think...

Visits

The visit to the University of Oxford took place of Thursday 21 July. The visitors arrived in Oxford by coach where they were met by student guides who took them on short tours of some of the Colleges and University buildings and later to the Colleges where they were entertained to lunch. In the afternoon they went sight-seeing again, some to the Museum of the History of Science to see a special exhibition illustrating the work of the early Fellows of the Royal Society, and some to Blackwells where a display of scientific books had been arranged. At 3.30 the visitors assembled in the Sheldonian Theatre where Honorary Degrees were conferred on five of the distinguished guests (see p. 86). After the Degree Ceremony there was a garden party at Wadham where the visitors were the guests of the Warden, Sir Maurice Bowra, and the Fellows. In the evening the President and Council were entertained to dinner at Wadham together with the Council of the British Academy as guests of Sir Maurice Bowra, President of the British Academy. On Monday 25 July a visit was made to the University of Cambridge. Twelve coaches left Burlington House and arrived at the University of Cambridge Library where the visitors were able to inspect the Library, and in particular, the special collection of exhibits with Royal Society associations.

Honorary Degree Ceremonies

The Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and London held Honorary Degree Ceremonies to mark the occasion of the Tercentenary of the Society when degrees were conferred on some of the many distinguished scientists who were participants in the Celebrations. The Ceremony at Oxford was held in the Sheldonian Theatre on Thursday 21 July when the Vice-Chancellor, Dr T. S. R. Boase, President of Magdalen, conferred honorary degrees on: Professor Felix Bloch Dr Alfred Newton Richards Professor Nikolai Nikolaevich Semenov Dr Edgar William Richard Steacie Professor Öjvind Winge The University of London Honorary Degree Ceremony which, in addition to the Tercentenary, was held to mark the occasion of the centenary o f the granting of the first science degree conferred by London University, was held at the Royal Festival Hall on Friday 22 July when Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, Chancellor of the University, presided and delivered the following Address:

The Geography and Ethnics of India's Northern Frontiers: Discussion

Before the paper the Chairman (Sir James Marshall-Cornwall) said: I would like to welcome most heartily the Society's guests, His Excellency the Ambassador of Nepal and Lord Birdwood. subject of our lecture this evening is one of intense and perennial interest; it is of more particular interest at the moment because of the international rivalries which have recently arisen along the historic borderland of India. Our Society has maintained a long and close association with the northern of India. Many of our past Presidents have been actively engaged in either surveying, or demarcating, or consolidating, or administering that six-thousand-mile-long I need only mention three of them:?Lord Curzon, who became our President in 1911, Sir Thomas Holdich, who was elected President in 1917, and Sir Francis Younghusband who succeeded Holdich two years later. Lord Curzon, when Chancellor of Oxford University after he returned from India, gave a memorable lecture in the Sheldonian Theatre on the subject of frontiers. Frontiers, he said, indeed the razor's edge, on which hang suspended the modern issues of war or peace, of life or death to nations. Sir Thomas Holdich, who spent thirty-three years of his life in surveying the Indian frontier, described it as The finest combination of boundary and barrier that exists in the world; never was such a God-given boundary set to such a vast, impressive and frontier. No man living is better acquainted with the problems presented by that stupendous frontier than our lecturer this evening. Sir Olaf Caroe entered the Indian Political Service forty-one years ago. In 1947, when British rule in India was handed over, he was Governor of the North-west Frontier Province. Throughout the whole of the Second World War he was Secretary of the External Affairs Department of the Government of India. We are looking forward anxiously to hear what Sir Olaf is allowed to tell us about that great which he knows so well.

OSLER AT OXFORD

I FIRST saw Sir William Osler when he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Science in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, at the Encaenia of 1904. He was in good company—Clifford Allbutt, Jonathan Hutchinson, Marconi, Sir William Macewen, of Glasgow, and others were with him—but Dr. Osler received a special ovation. There were already rumors that in view of Sir John Burdon-Sanderson's impending resignation, Osler might be the next Regius Professor of Medicine. I first met Osler in June of the following year, in the garden of The Lawn, Banbury Road, the residence of the Professor of Physiology, Dr. Francis Gotch. It was afternoon, and I was talking with Mrs. Gotch and her two daughters. Up the garden path in the sunshine, unannounced, came Dr. Osler, clad in professional frock coat and top hat, for he had just returned from a visit to London. He took off his hat and

Evolutionary Ethics. The Romanes Lecture Delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre 11 June 1943. Julian Huxley

<i>Evolutionary Ethics. The Romanes Lecture Delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre 11 June 1943</i>. Julian Huxley

Czechoslovak Degrees at Oxford

A UNIQUE ceremony was performed in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, on February 27, when the Vice-Chancellor of the University presided, at the request of the Czechoslovak Government, at the conferment on a group of Czechoslovak medical students of degrees of their own universities. The occasion had a practical and also a symbolic aspect. Czechoslovak students who have been able to complete their studies in Great Britain were thus acknowledged as trained workers, and given a status which will be readily recognized in their own country when the time comes for them to return and minister to their own people. They will not have to labour under the disadvantages sometimes inherent in possessing 'foreign' qualification. But there is also the wider significance of the event. One of the old universities of Great Britain, through its highest resident official, the Vice-Chancellor, gave itself for the time being to the use of the universities of Czechoslovakia, so that the jealously guarded privilege of the conferment of degrees might still be theirs. The difference between the treatment accorded to university and other students by the United Nations and by the Axis Powers needs no emphasis here : it is sufficient to refer to the numerous measures which have been taken to facilitate the continuance of their studies by foreign students in the free countries, and to contrast these conditions with the wholesale persecution to which they have been subjected in occupied Europe. The ceremony at Oxford was a fitting mark of the international character of learning.

The Classics in War-time

From 29 August to 5 September 1942, some four hundred and fifty persons, members of the Hellenic and Roman Societies and of the Classical Association and their friends, met in conference in Oxford to hear lectures, papers and discussions and to study special exhibitions of classical MSS, rare printed books and photographs and the cream of the Evans bequest of ancient coins. No one could doubt the motive which had brought them there, as they flocked day after day to the Sheldonian Theatre, the Divinity School, Christ Church Chapter House and other University lecture-halls to partake hungrily of the choice and varied fare spread before them. This was no mere gathering of professionals, but a congress of cultivated men and women of many walks in life and of all ages, bound together by devotion to our common heritage and all enjoying something of the very best from scholars of British and other nationalities, each a specialist in his own part of that all-embracing field of humane letters, art and thought which is the Classics. The dynamic, as opposed to static, character of classical studies was stamped upon all the lectures.

The Position of Colonies in a British Commonwealth of Nations. (Romanes Lecture delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre, May 14th, 1941.)

The Position of Colonies in a British Commonwealth of Nations. (Romanes Lecture delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre, May 14th, 1941.)

MUSEUMS AND NATIONAL LIFE. By Sir Frederic George Kenyon, M.A., D.LITT., G.B.E., K.C.B., Director and Chief Librarian, British Museum. The Romanes Lecture delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre, 17 June 1927. Oxford: the Clarendon Press. 2s.

MUSEUMS AND NATIONAL LIFE. By Sir Frederic George Kenyon, M.A., D.LITT., G.B.E., K.C.B., Director and Chief Librarian, British Museum. The Romanes Lecture delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre, 17 June 1927. Oxford: the Clarendon Press. 2s. - Volume 2 Issue 5