We may trace the influence of science also in the greatly deepened sense of the importance of origins. In science the chief triumphs have been won by tracing things to their beginnings; in physical structure to atoms and molecules, in animal life to nerve cells, protoplasm, or whatever is simplest and most primitive. Exactly the same effort is made in modern history; and nothing is more distinctive of it, in contrast with the comparatively superficial historical school of the eighteenth century, than the determination to trace the starting-point and original meaning of institutions. Ages which had been previously left to legend and myth have been patiently investigated, and it is to them that we are now referred for the explanation of our own times. But not only has the ideal of history changed; the material from which it is written, old in one sense, is to a large extent new in the sense that it is now for the first time accessible. The men of earlier times, even when they had the industry and the will for minute investigation, had seldom the means. The vast increase of accessible documents has caused history to be written afresh, to an extent best measured by the fact that, except those who rank as original authorities, Gibbon alone among historians prior to the present century still holds his ground. [Sidenote: Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859).] Thomas Babington Macaulay felt these modern influences, though not quite in their full force. He was the son of Zachary Macaulay, celebrated for his exertions in the Anti-Slavery crusade. At Cambridge, whither he went in 1818, young Macaulay had for contemporaries a very brilliant set of young men, including Derwent and Henry Nelson Coleridge, Moultrie, Praed and Charles Austin, 'the only man,' says Sir George Trevelyan, 'who ever succeeded in dominating Macaulay,' the man who weaned him from the Toryism in which he had been brought up, and 'brought him nearer to Radicalism than he ever was before or since.' A constitutional incapacity for and hatred of mathematics was punished by the omission of his name from the Tripos list of 1822. He had been 'gulfed.' Nevertheless, in 1824, he was elected to a Fellowship of Trinity College. He was called to the bar in 1826, but never took seriously to the law as a profession. He had received an earlier call to another profession, and during his stay at Cambridge he had been a frequent contributor to _Knights Quarterly Magazine_. But we may date from 1825, when his essay on Milton appeared in the _Edinburgh Review_, the opening of his career in literature. For many years afterwards he was a frequent and certainly the most effective contributor to the review.