fulness of a summary. I should in no case have wished to say anything as to his scientific and historical work proper in the former case because of my utter incompetence to form an estimate of it, in the latter because its value lies in qualities which, while they are in perfect accordance with the spirit of Leibniz s intellectual labours at large, hardly lend themselves to illustration or exposition on an occasion like the present. I shall return to the Annales Brunsvicenses from a different point of view before I close. Here, it will suffice to observe that, to quote from the late Ernst Curtius s brilliant oration on the Leibniz Day of the Berlin Academy in 1873, " though no theoretical connexion exists between those Annals and the doctrine of monads, yet Leibniz in his historical labours once more proved himself the great organiser of intellectual work, rightly perceiving what was really necessary for the foundation of a science of history, viz., the collection of documents and the investigation of sources, and thus setting a splendid example of painstaking and self-denying labour on the material at his disposal."
For, apart from these, there was hardly a field of human knowledge bearing on government and society with which he was unfamiliar and the cultivation of which he failed to advance; so that the very limitation which I have sought to impose upon myself by treating of Leibniz as a politician only does not, as a matter of fact, exclude all that I am forced to omit. Leibniz for instance, was a trained student of Law both civil and canonical, and, like all great jurists for I do not know what exception could be cited to the generalisation—he was, at all events in principle, an advocate of legal reform. The penal system which he found in existence in his own country was a special object of his critical study, and of the procedure in vogue against witches and witchcraft one of the lingering blemishes on the face of Western civilisation—he was a resolute opponent. He was, again, a political economist in days when the very basis for the application of economic principles
