d philosopher's
speculation to a well-demonstrated scientific theory. Evolution,
heredity, environment, have become household words, and their
application to history has influenced every one who has had to trace the
development of a people, the growth of an institution, or the
establishment of a cause. Other scientific theories and methods have
affected physical science as potently, but none has entered so vitally
into the study of man. What hitherto the eye of genius alone could
perceive may become the common property of every one who cares to read a
dozen books. But with all of our advantages, do we write better history
than was written before the year 1859, which we may call the line of
demarcation between the old and the new? If the English, German, and
American historical scholars should vote as to who were the two best
historians, I have little doubt that Thucydides and Tacitus would have a
pretty large majority. If they were asked to name a third choice, it
would undoubtedly lie between Herodotus and Gibbon. At the meeting of
this association in Cleveland, when methods of historical teaching were
under discussion, Herodotus and Thucydides, but no others, were
mentioned as proper object lessons. What are the merits of Herodotus?
Accuracy in details, as we understand it, was certainly not one of them.
Neither does he sift critically his facts, but intimates that he will
not make a positive decision in the case of conflicting testimony. "For
myself," he wrote, "my duty is to report all that is said, but I am not
obliged to believe it all alike,--a remark which may be understood to
apply to my whole history." He had none of the wholesome skepticism
which we deem necessary in the weighing of historical evidence; on the
contrary, he is frequently accused of credulity. Nevertheless, Percy
Gardner calls his narrative nobler than that of Thucydides, and Mahaffy
terms it an "incomparable history." "The truth is," wrote Macaulay in
his diary, when he was forty-nine years old, "I admire no historians
much except Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus." Sir M. E. Grant Duff
devoted his presidential address of 1895, before the Royal Historical
Society, wholly to Herodotus, ending with the conclusion, "The fame of
Herodotus, which has a little waned, will surely wax again." Whereupon
the London Times devoted a leader to the subject. "We are concerned," it
said, "to hear, on authority so eminent, that one of the most delightful
write