And if we ask why Cambridge should be Platonist, the answer is because it always resisted the Aristotelianism of the Schools. Reaction against scholasticism had brought Plato to Florence in the xv century, it made Plato at home in Cambridge in the xviith. We have called Cambridge the laboratory of the Reformation; there too, we see, was made the first attempt to reconcile Protestantism with philosophy: in undoing the servitude of the latter to religion, which had been the mark of the middle ages, the Cambridge Platonists did away with medievalism, joined hands, behind its back, with that Neo-Platonism of the Alexandrine schools which had influenced the early Church, defied, of course, scholasticism, and prepared the place for our modern moral sciences tripos. [Sidenote: Modern science.] We have already seen that Cambridge is the representative in England of the scientific movement which has changed the face of the modern world. It may perhaps be pretended that the stages of its development in Europe have been marked by the great men emanating from this one university. The names of Bacon, Gilbert, Harvey, Flamsteed, Newton, Darwin, are signposts of the direction which science was to take and landmarks of its achievements. [Illustration: ADDENBROKE’S HOSPITAL IN TRUMPINGTON STREET This building, as we now see it, was remodelled by Sir M. Digby Wyatt 1864-65.] William Gilbert the discoverer of terrestrial magnetism and of the affinity of magnetic and electric action, was praised by Galileo, while Erasmus called him “great to a degree which is enviable.” Flamsteed began that series of observations which initiated modern astronomy, Horrox came still earlier, and they have been followed by such Cantabrigians as Newton, Nevil Maskelyne, Herschell, Airy and Adams. Newton and Darwin are two of the greatest names in the history of the physical and physiological sciences--they stand out as creators of epochs in the march of human knowledge: on Newton’s statue in Trinity chapel are inscribed the words _qui genus humanum ingenio superavit_--of whom else could they be spoken?--Darwin has revolutionised our thoughts in spheres far removed from those directly affected by his great hypothesis.