580 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



work designed specifically for those who have not access to its sources. 

 It is an old, but almost forgotten, maxim that the proper use of the 

 foot-note should ordinarily be to assist readers desirous of further in- 

 formation than the limits of the volume can afford, by referring them 

 to the proper sources. In argumentative and other dissertations 

 seeking to reverse accepted beliefs or presenting the results of minute 

 study of events hitherto not exhaustively investigated, citations 

 of sources and a free, or at least liberal, use of sustaining references 

 particularly in disputed points are scientifically proper. These 

 works are designed primarily, chiefly, and essentially, for a limited 

 class of students and investigators engaged upon like problems and 

 having pretty much the same access to sources as the author. To 

 such readers, using the work in conjunction with other, especially 

 similar, works, the citations have a real significance and value. But 

 historical records as such, including the organized and literary nar- 

 ratives which it is the ultimate object of historical science to create, 

 are intended primarily, chiefly, and essentially for users who are not 

 expected to be, and ordinarily are not in fact, in a position to judge 

 of the events or points in question otherwise by the record or narra- 

 tive. The information may indeed be paralleled to a greater or less 

 extent in other records or narratives perchance accessible to the user; 

 but with this incidental circumstance the recorder or narrator has 

 nothing to do. The only claim of his work to attention from those, for 

 whom it is essentially designed, and therefore its essential right to 

 existence and to publication, is not in so far as it is paralleled, but only 

 in so far as it is not paralleled, in other accessible records and narra- 

 tives. In a work of this character, therefore, foot-notes, either in 

 their ordinary function for the purpose of citing further sources of 

 information or as sustaining references, can have only an incidental 

 and at most occasional place. Their use for either of these purposes 

 in the record or narrative is never obligatory, because no operator can 

 be required to contravene the essential principles and conditions 

 governing his special activity. But they are also not absolutely 

 excluded even as sustaining references in exceptional points where the 

 narrator realizes that others may be disinclined to believe a statement, 

 because, used incidentally, they need not defeat the essential purpose of 

 the work as a record for those who have not access to the sources ; and 

 yet this use may assist incidentally a fellow, especially a contemporary, 

 investigator who may have such access. An extensive or free use of 

 such citations and references, however, has no practical, and therefore 

 no scientific, standing in the works in question. 



Summarized, the chief points in the foregoing parts i and ii upon 

 the purpose of historical records and narratives as such and the con- 



