Outline of Universal History | Page 9

embodied in songs
of an early date, may be transmitted orally, though in a poetic dress.
Songs and legends, it may be added, even when they do not suffice to
verify the incidents to which they refer, are valuable as disclosing the
sentiments and habits of the times when they originated, or were
cherished. The central fact, the nucleus of the tradition, may be
historical when all the details belonging with it have been effaced, or
have been superseded by other details, the product of imagination. The
historical student is to distinguish between traditionary tales which are
untrustworthy throughout, and traditions which have their roots in fact.
Apart from oral tradition, the sources of historical knowledge are the
following:--
1. Contemporary registers, chronicles, and other documents, either now,
or known to have been originally, in a manuscript form.
2. Inscriptions on monuments and coins. Such, for example, are the
inscriptions on the monuments of Egypt and on the buried ruins of

Nineveh and Babylon. Such are the ancient epitaphs, heathen and
Christian, in the Roman catacombs. The study of ancient inscriptions of
various sorts has thrown much light of late upon Grecian and Roman
antiquity.
3. The entire literature of a people, in which its intellectual, moral, and
social condition, at any particular era, is mirrored.
4. Material structures of every kind, as altars, tombs, private
dwellings,--as those uncovered at Pompeii,--public edifices, civil and
religious, paintings, weapons, household utensils. These all tell a story
relative to the knowledge and taste, the occupations and domestic
habits, and the religion, of a past generation or of an extinct people.
5 Language is a memorial of the past, of the more value since it is not
the product of deliberate contrivance. Comparative philology,
following languages back to their earlier stages and to the parent stocks,
unveils the condition of society at remote epochs. It not only describes
the origin of nations, but teaches something respecting their primitive
state.
6. Histories written at former periods, but subsequently to the events
described in them, are a secondary but valuable source of historical
knowledge. This is especially true when their authors had access to
traditions that were nearer their fountain, or to literary monuments
which have perished.
HISTORICAL CRITICISM.--Historical scholars are much more
exacting as regards evidence than was formerly the case. The criticism
of what purports to be proof is more searching. At the same time, what
is called "historical divination" can not be altogether excluded. Learned
and sagacious scholars have conjectured the existence of facts, where a
gap in recorded history--"the logic of events"--seemed to presuppose
them; and later discoveries have verified the guess. This is analogous to
the success of Leverrier and Adams in inferring the existence of an
unknown planet, which the telescope afterwards discovered. An
example of historical divination on a large scale is furnished by the
theories of the great German historian, Niebuhr, in respect to early

Roman history. He propounded opinions, however, which in many
particulars fail to obtain general assent at present.
CREDIBILITY OF HISTORY.--At the opposite pole from credulity is
an unwarrantable historical skepticism. The story is told of Sir Walter
Raleigh, that when he was a prisoner in the Tower, and was engaged in
writing his History of the World, he heard the sounds of a fracas in the
prison-yard. On inquiry of those who were concerned in it, and were on
the spot, he found so many contradictions in their statements that he
could not get at the truth. Whereupon, it occurred to him as a vain thing
to undertake to describe what had occurred on the vast theater of the
world, when he could not ascertain the truth about an event occurring
within a bow-shot. The anecdote simply illustrates, however, the
difficulty of getting at the exact truth respecting details,--a difficulty
constantly exemplified in courts of justice. The fact of the conflict in
the court of the Tower, the general cause, the parties engaged, the
consequences,--as, for example, what punishment was inflicted,--were
undisputed. The great facts which influence the course of history, it is
not difficult to ascertain. Moreover, as against an extravagant
skepticism, it may be said that history provides us with a vast amount
of authentic information which contemporaries, and even individual
actors, were not possessed of. This is through the bringing to light of
documents from a great variety of sources, many of which were secret,
or not open to the view of all the leaders in the transactions to which
they refer. The private correspondence of the Protestant
leaders,--Luther, Melanchthon, Cranmer, etc.,--the letters of Erasmus,
the official reports of the Venetian ambassadors, the letters of William
the Silent and of Philip II., put us in possession of much information,
which at the time was a secret to most of the prominent participants