o64 
A half-starved pig. 
The following fact, though not unexampled, yet 
seems to me worth record. In the first week of 
September, 1883, on the farmof Mr. William Burr, 
in Medina county, O., the steam-thresher was at 
work; and, as usual, a large stack of straw was grad- 
ually accumulated. Two or three days afterwards 
Mr. Burr missed a fat sow weighing about three 
hundred pounds. After a long search and much 
inquiry, he came to the conclusion that she was lost 
in some unknown manner, and thought no more of 
her. About the 20th of March, 1884, in pulling down 
the remains of the straw-stack, the sow was found, 
thin as a deal board, but living. Her weight was 
a hundred and sixty pounds. She had been impris- 
oned for two hundred and five days, without water, 
and with only the straw for food. Treated with judg- 
ment, and fed slightly at first, she did well, and is 
now growing fat again. E. W. CLAYPOLE. 
Buchtel college, Akron, O. 
THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN HIS- 
ROWICA LES UTNE 
Tue phrase ‘science of history’ suggests 
two very different things to different minds. 
To one kind of persons it means philosophical 
reflection and combination upon the course of 
human. action in masses, in the purpose of 
finally discovering the laws by which such 
action has been governed, and then of apply- 
ing these laws to prophesy about the future of 
the race. ‘To these persons, Buckle is the 
ideal of a scientific historian. He alone, they 
fancy, has grasped the true principle of his- 
toric research, and truly shown the parallelism 
between the historical and the scientific meth- 
ods. Just as the naturalist discovers his facts, 
and then combines them into laws, so the his- 
torian shall, it is said, proceed from single 
phenomena of human effort to the discovery 
of laws according to which all such human ac- 
tion has moved, and therefore must and will 
move. On the whole, perhaps, this is the view 
of historical science which prevails in the 
minds of most educated persons in America. 
But there is another idea suggested by these 
words to those who have been accustomed to 
the thought and language of another school. 
These persons maintain that such effort is not 
historical work at all, but quite another sci- 
ence, dealing with the results of history. It is 
philosophy, with its general hypotheses and 
their more or less effectual support in dis- 
covered fact. All this should be called, not 
history, but the philosophy of history, just as 
there might be a philosophy of literature or of 
music, pursued successfully, perhaps with the 
best success, by men wholly untrained in either 
literature or music. Buckle and his kind, this 
school asserts, were not historians, but phi- 
b) 
SCIENCE. 
-call forth all his intellectual energy. 
[Vou. LIL, 
losophers; and it claims for itself the more 
inodest title. This we may, for convenience, 
call the modern German school, though it has 
its followers now widely spread in other lands. 
Not that Germans of our century have not 
cared to concern themselves with the wider 
problems of man’s social and political destiny 
(nowhere, perhaps, have these problems re- 
ceived more thought than just in Germany), 
but this has remained the province of phi- 
losophers ; and the men who have raised Ger- 
many to the leadership in modern historical 
research have, on the whole, kept themselves 
free from all speculation of the sort. To this 
school, then, the ‘science of history’ means - 
the pursuit of historical knowledge according 
to scientific method. It concerns itself wholly 
with extracting from existing material the 
truth of the record. But to do this, it demands 
previously the most rigid examination and 
criticism of the material. For this examina- 
tion, a wide and deep training in language, and 
in a general knowledge of the accepted his- 
torical tradition, is necessary; so that, while 
this German school is content to restrict itself 
within seemingly narrow limits, the man who 
would conform to all its demands finds a life- 
work before him, broad and severe enough to 
Its mot- 
to is found in the modest word of the elder 
Droysen, that the object of historical study is 
‘forschend zu verstehen’ (‘ to comprehend while 
investigating ’). 
The study of history in America is in its 
infancy. It has remained until now an object 
of almost complete neglect in the programmes 
of collegiate as well as of secondary study. 
This neglect must have had a cause: we have 
no desire to force an issue between the two 
schools of historical study ; but the fact cannot 
be overlooked, that, as long as American edu- 
cation remained under the influence of the 
early English tradition, history, as an item in 
education, was practically left out of sight. 
Men had, or professed, an enormous respect 
for it. One can read orations and lectures by 
the score, upon the usefulness of history as an 
element in the life of the present; but when 
it came to putting this usefulness into play, as 
a part of a scheme of education, giving to his- 
tory a fair opportunity by the side of Greek, 
Latin, and mathematics, history had to give 
way. Men showed their respect for it by let- 
ting it alone. On the other hand, no sooner 
did the wave of German influence begin, about — 
a dozen years ago, to beat with a violence that 
could not be disregarded, upon our shores, 
than the fortunes of historical teaching were 
No. 66. — 
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