In so cursory a review of a large subject, I can only select one or two points as illustrations, and speak of them as specimens of the general enlightenment of the age. I therefore turn to a particular class about which we now know a great deal, more particularly owing to a large discovery of documents which I was fortunate enough to make in 1890. It is the Greek will or testament. Lawsuits concerning such documents also form the majority of the speeches of Isæus, the collection of which has been edited with great skill and learning by Mr. William Wyse of Trinity College, Cambridge. It used to be thought that all this matter of testament was due to the Romans. It seems now tolerably certain that in this as in most of the other refinements of life the Romans only transmitted to us what the Greeks had taught them. In most early states it is only gradually, and not without some jealousy, that the individual is permitted to bequeath his property as he pleases. At first, he is regarded as the member of a clan, to which his property reverts under certain fixed conditions; later on, the state controls the division of it among the immediate family of the testator, and will not permit any passing of it away to strangers, still less to those who are not citizens. Whether the Greek states ever left absolute liberty to their citizens in this matter may be doubted, the interest of the state being much more jealously guarded among these small polities than among the large modern States, when an occasional misuse of such a power does no grave public mischief, and only excites moderate censure. But the whole form of the wills we have in Egyptian papyri, and of which we have examples in stone inscriptions, such as the record of the will of one Epicteta who bequeathed her estate to public and religious objects, is perfectly modern. Here I quote you the usual formula. First comes the date according to the years of kings or eponymous magistrates. Then “This is the will of Peisias the Lycian, son of X., of sound mind and deliberate intention. May it be my lot to live on in health and manage mine own property, but should anything human happen to me, I bequeath to my children so much, to my wife such and such things (often specifying the articles), I set free certain slaves, I set apart money for religious purposes. And I appoint as executors such and such people,” in the case of soldiers in Egypt generally the King and Queen and their children; and then there follow the names of several, often seven or eight, witnesses.[43] These habits, which imply a settled society, with ordinary habits and traditions, had spread from Greece to Greek Egypt three centuries before Christ. There is no doubt that they spread similarly not only to the west, but throughout Asia Minor and Syria so far as they were not in these regions already in vogue. I will only add that if you desire to read how clearly and carefully a long