[Bowmax] FUNDAMENTAL PROCESSES IN HISTORICAL SCIENCE 159 
ence establish that confirmatory tests, such as checking or cor- 
roboration by parallel records, are not necessary before the state- 
ments in such record are accepted as correct, but on the contrary, 
tests which disprove such statements are necessary before they 
are rejected as incorrect. 
3. In actual experience, where parallel records that exem- 
plify in their statements the requisites for trustworthiness are 
available, it is found invariably that such records are in essential 
agreement and corroborate one another; therefore, where but 
one such record of a series of events is available, it is a necessary 
conclusion, deduced from actual experience, that other such re- 
cords of the same events, if they were available, would be found 
in fact to be in essential agreement with the single record and 
would corroborate it; and hence such essential agreement and 
corroboration, in so far as they have evidential value, must be 
regarded as virtually, though not actually, available. 
4, In the Ist applicative principle it is established that any 
record (regardless of whether it be a single record, or one of several 
parallel records) must, if it exemplify in its statements the requisites 
for trustworthiness, be accepted as essentially correct, 7.e., as cor- 
rect save in those points, if any, where incidental error can be 
proven: in other words by the 1st applicative principle it is esta- 
blished that corroboration is not necessary before the statements 
in such a record, though it be the sole record of the events narrated, 
are accepted as correct, but on the contrary, disproof is necessary 
before its statements are rejected as incorrect. 
: 5. A record exemplifying in its statements the five requisites 
for trustworthiness accredits its writer as an operator who is 
applying the corresponding five correct processes in formulating 
the statements in the record. Since these processes lead necessarily 
to essentially correct results, there is no need of a checking or cor- 
roborating record to ascertain whether the statements in the single 
record are essentially correct. They could not be otherwise. 
6. By the 4th fundamental principle of science, where a 
correct process is applied by an accredited operator, those persons 
who are not in a position to judge of the matter for themselves 
are required as reasonable men to accept his results as correct 
unless the contrary be shown. A record exemplifying in its state- 
ments the five requisites for trustworthiness accredits its writer 
as an operator who is applying the corresponding five correct 
processes in formulating the statements in the record; and if such 
record be the only record of the events which it narrates, one is not 
in a position to judge of the matter (otherwise than by the record) ; 
