12 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 
I need not dwell upon these facts. One can easily 
see that the appearance of fresh material must now 
and then oblige us to reverse, and often to modify, our 
judgments upon men and events. The student of his- 
tory who has once learned how to go to the source 
will never be satisfied with working at second hand. 
And the multiplication of sources goes on. What I 
have mentioned of the British archives has gone on in 
other countries, although it is not everywhere that 
access has been made so easy. Many secrets of Euro- 
pean history are still locked up in the Vatican, to 
reward the persistent curiosity of a future generation. 
Meanwhile the Italian government publishes, in a 
series of magnificent folios, all the original material 
that it can find in Italian libraries concerning the dis- 
covery of America; and the publication, year by year, 
of the records of the India House at Seville keeps 
throwing fresh light upon that intricate subject. In 
such musty records there is no quarter from which 
valuable information may not be derived. A few 
years ago I showed, by a comparison of extracts from 
old Spanish account books, that the younger Pinzon, 
the commander of Columbus’s smallest caravel in 
1492, was not absent from Spain during the year 
1506; and this little point went a long way toward 
settling two or three important historical questions.' 
It is not only public documents that thus come for- 
ward to help us, but every year witnesses the publica- 
tion of private memoirs and correspondence. What a 
flood of light is thrown upon the Wars of the Roses by 
the Paston Letters, written by members of a Norfolk 
family from 1422 to 1509. Public attention was first 
1“TDiscovery of America,” II., p. 68. 
