134 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
iv. The Requisites for Trustworthiness, if ex- 
emplified in the Statements of a Record, con- 
stitute Prima Facie Evidence that the Writer 
either Personally or through Trustworthy 
Media had, in respect of Nearness in Time 
and Place to the Events Narrated as well as 
in all other Respects, all the Opportunities 
and all the Access to Information Necessary 
in order to make his Record Trustworthy... . 162 
INTRODUCTION. 
The object of this paper is to ascertain the conditions on which historical 
trustworthiness necessarily depends. An introductory statement con- 
cerning the relation between the four sections of the paper may serve 
to elucidate the argument and also to show its general bearing on 
historical method. 
The distinctive feature of the argument as a whole is an effort to 
submit history to the general and ordinary tests of science. Not 
unfrequently it is said that the writing of history is in some respects 
an art and in others a science; and in fact it is quite the fashion and 
altogether a trite thing to grant unreservedly that history is a science. 
Many, however, having made this broad admission, would shrink 
nevertheless from the inference that history, being a science, must 
meet fully the same general and ordinary tests as all other sciences, 
including those branches commonly called exact; and were this con- 
clusion pressed as a logical and necessary deduction from the premises, 
not a few would reconsider their previous admission, and some would 
withdraw it altogether. For this reason Section I of the present paper, 
entitled the Function of Historical Science, though brief, is important 
because here is shown the connecting link between history and the 
general body of the sciences, the place where she and they get upon a 
common footing. Unless this connection can first be established, unless 
it be conclusively shown that history has all the rights and obligations 
of a place in the general company of the sciences because she is able 
properly to fill that place, the argument in the ensuing sections, where 
history is submitted to the general and ordinary tests of science, will be 
pointless. In Section I, therefore, this connecting link, and her right 
