riginal is hard for anybody but the author to decipher. And, in fact,
the text of memoirs and posthumous correspondence is often disfigured by
errors of transcription and punctuation occurring in editions which at
first sight give the impression of having been carefully executed.[65]

Turning now to ancient documents, let us ask in what state they have
been preserved. In nearly every case the originals have been lost, and
we have nothing but copies. Have these copies been made directly from
the originals? No; they are copies of copies. The scribes who executed
them were not by any means all of them capable and conscientious men;
they often transcribed texts which they did not understand at all, or
which they understood incorrectly, and it was not always the fashion, as
it was in the time of the Carlovingian Renaissance, to compare the
copies with the originals.[66]

If our printed books, after the successive revisions of author and
printer's reader, are still but imperfect reproductions, it is only to
be expected that ancient documents, copied and recopied as they have
been for centuries with very little care, and exposed at every fresh
transcription to new risk of alteration, should have reached us full of
inaccuracies.

There is thus an obvious precaution to be taken. Before using a document
we must find out whether its text is "sound"--that is, in as close
agreement as possible with the original manuscript of the author; and
when the text is "corrupt" we must emend it. In using a text which has
been corrupted in transmission, we run the risk of attributing to the
author what really comes from the copyists. There are actual cases of
theories which were based on passages falsified in transmission, and
which collapsed as soon as the true readings were discovered or
restored. Printers' errors and mistakes in copying are not always
innocuous or merely diverting; they are sometimes insidious and capable
of misleading the reader.[67]

One would naturally suppose that historians of repute would always make
it a rule to procure "sound" texts, properly emended and restored, of
the texts they have to consult. That is a mistake. For a long time
historians simply used the texts which they had within easy reach,
without verifying their accuracy. And, what is more, the very scholars
whose business it is to edit texts did not discover the art of restoring
them all at once; not so very long ago, documents were commonly edited
fro