168 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
owner. Again, in Case 2, a biographer of B, in a paragraph summarizing 
his financial operations, might mention that B secured the property at 
a cost of $30,000, in a connection where it would be irrelevant and 
improper to mention the circumstance that $5,000 of this cost was due 
to the removal of an old store; while, on the contrary, in an historical 
account of property values in B’s city and time, an historian might 
state that the property cost B $25,000, in a connection where it would 
be equally irrelevant and improper to mention the incidental cireum- 
stance which made the actual cost to him $30,000. Further, in Case 16, 
an historian, in writing an account of public school inspection in the 
province in which the county in question is situated, might have occa- 
sion to refer now to C and now to D as inspector for this county, and 
yet always so incidentally that it would be improper, merely with a 
view to forestalling an incidental discrepancy at other points in the 
same or another work, to halt the narrative in order to explain that in 
this county there were two inspectors with the same rank and title. 
Similarly, in each of the nine above mentioned cases, it can be shown 
that just as in conversation the interest respectively of several inquirers 
may exclude now one, and now another, of two equally valuable stand- 
points, with a resulting discrepancy in verbal statements, so in subse- 
quent written narratives the respective interests of groups of readers, 
as fixed by the writers’ own themes, may also exclude now one, and now 
another, of two such stand-points with a resulting discrepancy in written 
statements: and from this fact it is a necessary deduction that dis- 
crepancy has a legitimate and necessary place not only, as heretofore 
shown, in the truthful records which constitute the historian’s original 
material, but also in those truthful narratives which constitute his own 
final product; and therefore discrepancy has a legitimate and necessary 
place in all truthful historical records and writings whatsoever. 
VI. THE TREATMENT OF DISCREPANCY 
(a) WHERE THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF A DISCREPANCY BETWEEN 
EssENTIALLY TRUSTWORTHY RECORDS ARE KNOWN. 
Where the circumstances of a discrepancy between essentially 
trustworthy records are known, the conflicting statements contain the 
elements of a discrepancy, which, however, is not recognized as such, 
