16 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 
parchments can be reproduced with strictest accuracy, 
with all their stains and rents and cracks and 
smooches, and with our magnifying-glass we may 
patiently scrutinize each small detail and satisfy our- 
selves as to whether it has been rightly interpreted. 
A beautiful example of this is furnished by the book 
of an American scholar, whose premature death 
science mourns. “The Finding of Wineland,” by 
Arthur Middleton Reeves, contains complete photo- 
graphic facsimiles of the three famous Icelandic manu- 
scripts which tell of the Norse discovery of America. 
Another example is the gigantic work of another 
American, Benjamin Stevens, who is publishing in 
London a hundred volumes of diplomatic correspond- 
ence relating to the American Revolution, the whole 
of it reproduced by photography. The time has thus 
arrived when the scholar, without stirring from his 
chimney-corner, may send by mail to distant countries 
and obtain strict copies of things that it would once 
have cost months of travelling to see. It is not hoped 
that the time will come when an occasional literary 
pilgrimage, with its keen pleasures, can be quite dis- 
pensed with; nor is it likely to come. But we see 
how much has been done toward bringing the his- 
torian face to face with his sources of information. 
The increasing disposition to insist upon knowledge 
at first hand, which distinguishes the new from the 
old ways of treating history, is but one phase of the 
scientific and realistic spirit of the age in which we 
live. It is one of the marks of the growing intel- 
lectual maturity that comes with civilization. There 
is nothing to show that the highly trained minds of 
the present day are wider in grasp or deeper in pene- 
