ology properly so called and its
detached branches--Numismatic and Heraldry.

We are now in a position to examine to some purpose the hazy notion
expressed by the phrase, "the sciences auxiliary to history." We also
read of "ancillary sciences," and, in French, "sciences satellites."
None of these expressions is really satisfactory.

First of all, the so-called "auxiliary sciences" are not all of them
_sciences_. Diplomatic, for example, and the History of Literature are
only systematised accumulations of facts, acquired by criticism, which
are of a nature to facilitate the application of critical methods to
documents hitherto untouched. On the other hand, Philology is an
organised science, and has its own laws.

In the second place, among the branches of knowledge auxiliary--properly
speaking, not to history, but to historical research--we must
distinguish between those which every worker in the field ought to
master, and those in respect of which he needs only to know where to
look when he has occasion to make use of them; between knowledge which
ought to become part of a man's self, and information which he may be
content to possess only in potentiality. A mediaevalist should _know_ how
to read and understand mediaeval texts; he would gain no advantage by
accumulating in his memory the mass of particular facts pertaining to
the History of Literature and Diplomatic which are to be found, in their
proper place, in well-constructed works of reference.

Lastly, there are no branches of knowledge which are auxiliary to
History (or even historical research) in general--that is, which are
useful to all students irrespectively of the particular part of history
on which they are engaged.[48] It appears, then, that there is no
general answer possible to the question raised at the beginning of this
chapter: in what should the technical apprenticeship of the scholar or
historian consist? In what does it consist? That depends. It depends on
the part of history he proposes to study. A knowledge of palaeography is
quite useless for the purpose of investigating the history of the
French Revolution, and a knowledge of Greek is equally useless for the
treatment of a question in mediaeval French history.[49] But we may go so
far as to say that the preliminary outfit of every one who wishes to do
original work in history should consist (in addition to the "common
education," that is, general culture, of which Daunou writes) in the
k