mmense collections which are either badly catalogued or not
catalogued at all. Experience proves beyond a doubt that the prospect of
these long searches, which must be performed before the more
intellectual part of the work can be begun, has deterred, and continues
to deter, men of excellent abilities from undertaking historical work.
They are, in fact, confronted with a dilemma: either they must work on a
supply of documents which is in all probability incomplete, or they must
spend themselves in unlimited searches, often fruitless, the results of
which seldom appear worth the time they have cost. It goes against the
grain to spend a great part of one's life in turning over catalogues
without indexes, or in passing under review, one after another, all the
items which go to form accumulations of uncatalogued _miscellanea_, in
order to obtain information (positive or negative) which might have been
obtained easily and instantaneously if the collections had been
catalogued and if the catalogues had been indexed. The most serious
consequence of the present imperfection of the material aids to
Heuristic is the discouragement which is sure to be felt by many able
men who know their worth, and have some sense of the due proportion of
effort and reward.[39]

If it lay in the nature of things that the search for historical
documents, in public depositories, must necessarily be as laborious as
it still is, we might resign ourselves to the inconvenience: no one
thinks of regretting the inevitable expenditure of time and labour which
is demanded by archaeological research, whatever the results may prove to
be. But the imperfection of the modern instruments of Heuristic is quite
unnecessary. The state of things which existed for some centuries has
now been reformed indifferently; there is no valid reason why it should
not some day be reformed altogether. We are thus led, after treating of
the causes and the effects, to say a few words about the remedies.

The instruments of Heuristic are being continually perfected, before our
eyes, in two ways. Every year witnesses an increase in the number of
descriptive catalogues of archives, libraries, and museums, prepared by
the functionaries attached to these institutions. In addition to this,
powerful learned societies employ experts to pass from one depository
to another cataloguing the documents there, in order to pick out all the
documents of a particular class, or relating to a special