Modern research has shown that western law in the Middle Ages was strongly influenced by Mosaic law. This influence became even stronger in Sweden when the theocratic monarchy and the orthodox clergy, by an addendum to the law, also introduced the death penalty of the Pentateuch for crimes against ‘the law of God’, including violence and verbal abuse against elderly parents. Since all prosecutions for crimes requiring the death penalty had to be tried in the court of appeal, the records of the appeal courts give an overall picture of the application of the law during a 250-year period. Prosecutions for crimes against parents increased during this period from just a few cases to a hundred per year. The death sentence was mitigated in the higher courts. The trend can be interpreted as an enforcement wave, but also as an expression of serious social unrest and economic conflicts in peasant society in the first half of the 19th century.

Did science develop differently in different ancient civilisations, and if so, why? This article compares the development of medicine, mathematics and astronomy in ancient Greece and ancient China. It identifies certain significant differences in the way in which the problems were formulated and the aims and methods used to resolve them, and it relates these to the social institutions and values of the society within which the scientists work.

This study of the problems which, in the light of developing literary theory, still confront the critic of poetry, concentrates on the lyric. Its close relationship to music throughout its evolution leads to an analysis—with examples—of the way in which sound and thought patterns combine both in the making of the poem and in its effects on the reader. In this context I indicate possibilities for future studies in the nature of reader reception and suggest that benefit might be derived from interdisciplinary research involving cognitive scientists. Throughout, I stress the obligation for the critic to take into account the holistic nature of the poem.

In the wake of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union the legitimacy of European institutions and their law-making powers are questioned in all Member States. These questions are related to the understanding of sovereignty as the final arbiter of right and wrong in the democratic nation state. The role of law in this context is analysed by relying on European thinkers of the enlightenment who have shaped our understanding of law and legal systems to this day: Jeremy Bentham, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. An analysis of the case law of the European Court of Justice reveals the constitutionalization of European law. The chain that bound sovereignty and law together was broken when the Court ruled that the Treaty confers upon citizens the right to enforce specific Treaty obligations of Member States in their domestic Courts of law. The task for the Community is to develop standards of Community law that limit the Community's jurisdiction just as it limits the power of Member States.

A long history of analysis has taken apart organisms into molecular structures. However, the understanding of how biological forms are put together in development and evolution has eluded biologists until very recently. Comparative molecular data on genes in different phyla is uncovering an extraordinary conservation since Precambrian times of gene structures associated with functions. The implications of these findings and our increasing knowledge of how genes control development in a few model organisms, invites a consideration of possible approaches to tackle the problem of how organismic forms are constructed and evolve.

Present understanding suggests that a doubling of CO2 emission will occur in about 50 years and will lead to global warming of 2–4°C. Data from the past supports this. The paper analyses the factors influencing climatic change and the challenges to humanity this presents.

The discovery of large quantities of gold and silver in the New World following the voyage of Christopher Columbus had a major impact on the subsequent history of the world economy. These two precious metals together with copper were regarded as the standard and measure of value in all societies throughout history. The sudden increase in the supply of gold and silver greatly increased the capacity of individual countries such as Spain and Portugal to finance wars and imports of consumer goods. The new Spanish coin, the real of eight, became an international currency for settling trade balances, and large quantities of these coins were exported to the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and China to purchase oriental commodities such as silk piece goods, cotton textiles, industrial raw material such as indigo, and various kinds of spices, later followed by tea, coffee, and porcelain. The trade in New World gold and silver depended on the development of new and adequate mining techniques in Mexico and Peru to extract the ore and refine the metal. South German mining engineers greatly contributed to the transplantation of European technology to the Americas, and the Spanish-American silver mines utilised the new mercury amalgamation method to extract refined silver from the raw ores. Although the techniques used in Mexico and Peru were not particularly advanced by contemporary European standards, the American mine owners remained in business for more than three hundred years, and the supply of American silver came to be the foundation of the newly rising Indian Ocean world economy in the 17th and 18th centuries.

This is an account of the jurisprudence expounded by the Swedes Axel Hägerström, Wilhelm Lundstedt, Karl Olivecrona and the Dane Alf Ross. The characteristic features of this school of legal science are the firm rejection of idealism and conceptualism and a sociological approach to legal phenomena. Severe criticism has been directed against the way in which, particularly, Swedish Social Democrats made use of the tenets of Realism in justifying legislative measures in certain areas.

The 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain was marked on 31 March 1992 by a solemn ceremony in a Madrid synagogue at which the King of Spain welcomed Sephardic Jews back to their own country. This article examines the many benefits conferred on medieval Spain by its highly cultured Jewish population, the political background to the decree of expulsion and the gradual stages by which Sephardic Jews came to be welcomed back to their ancestral land, Sefarad.

The history of research on nerve conduction and muscle contraction shows many interesting parallels not only in the development of ideas about the underlying mechanisms but also in over-emphasis on certain ‘principles’ and in the loss of valid discoveries made at the turn of the century.

This paper will examine some of the types of biological evidence that allow us an insight into past environments and will consider some of the concepts that affect and limit our interpretations of past environments, and through them climatic changes.

Scandinavia was the birthplace of palaeoenvironmental studies; basic to these being the concepts of speciation formulated in Uppsala by Linnaeus nearly 250 years ago. Sernander proposed his bog regeneration theories in 1910 and von Post gave his first two lectures on pollen analysis in 1916. Iversen demonstrated how the impact of human activities could be disentangled from climate change and later discussed the effects of lags in the vegetation at the start of the post glacial. These laid the framework for much that I will describe.

At the turn of the century the two botanists Blytt and Sernander proposed a sub-division of the recent past (the post glacial period or Holocene as we now call it) on the basis of biological evidence preserved in bogs. They described wood layers in peat bogs and introduced the terms Boreal and Sub-Boreal for the time spanned by the wood layers, and the Atlantic and Sub-Atlantic for what they interpreted as the intervening wetter periods. These wood layers are as obvious now as they were in 1900 and the terms Boreal and Atlantic have gone in and out of fashion over the intervening years.

Relations between universities and industry have become very important. Universities have a clear mandate for providing good basic education, but this is not always appreciated by industry, which is looking for technological training.

As a consequence of the diminished role that Greek and Roman antiquity plays in secondary school education, the impact which Classical antiquity still has on our contemporary culture is underestimated in public opinion.

Two men, as different in personality as it is possible to be, Paul Rosbaud and Robert Maxwell, each played a part in forming Pergamon Press, one of today's leading scientific publishers. This article outlines the tale.

Is the end of the 20th century comparable with the end of the 19th century, the so-called fin de siècle? To what extent are the cultural characterizations of that decade—for fin de siècle is first and foremost a cultural concept—applicable to our days? The answer to this question is not easy to give because there are similarities as well as dissimilarities. The central preoccupation of the fin de siècle however was the feeling of decadence, the idea that European civilization was past its prime and on to the end. This notion is not a characteristic of the present day's cultural climate and therefore there exists a fundamental difference between the two periods.

The paper describes very briefly the development of theoretical accounts of the system of the world from Antiquity to Kepler. It shows how all the three great scientific traditions—the Aristotelian, the Platonic and the Archimedean—have been active throughout this history. There is no single ‘scientific’ approach to the phenomena of nature.