law must hold with regard to myself or others ? He 
says, that the strongest proof I have for my inevitable 
mortality is the reductio ad absurdum ; but I think 
that here he is mistaken that there is reductio ad 
absurdum , in the proper sense of the term, in the 
belief that I shall never die, although we may 
admit, with Newman, that there is a surplusage of 
belief over proof when I determine that I individually 
must die. 
In that very clever and amusing jeu d’ esprit by Arch- 
bishop Whately, Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Buona- 
parte, he has shown that logically we are not justified in 
believing that such a person as the first Emperor of the 
French ever existed. To state such a proposition seems to 
carry with it its own refutation, but the mock-serious argument 
of the Archbishop is sustained with wonderful skill and ability. 
His object, of course, was to show that the kind of reasoning by 
which infidels attempt to shake our faith in the narrative of 
Scripture ought equally to shake our belief in the existence of 
the first Napoleon. 
I will now say a few words about the father of history, 
Herodotus, and briefly compare him with Thucydides. 
In his Literature of Greece, Colonel Mure calls Herodotus 
ff an essentially honest and veracious historian,” and says that, 
“ rigid, in fact, qs has been the scrutiny to which his text 
has been subjected, no distinct case of wilful misstatement 
or perversion of fact has been substantiated against him.” 
Now what were the materials which Herodotus had for com- 
posing his history ? They were (1.) previous histories ; (2.) 
monumental records preserved in national repositories and 
religious sanctuaries or places of public resort. He himself 
quotes only one older historian, Hecatseus of Miletus, but 
several others had written before him, such as GEgeon of Samos, 
Bion, and Beiochus of Proconnesus, Endemus of Paros, Charon 
of Lampsacus and Pherecydes of Leros. We do not, however, 
know that Herodotus really had access to copies of their manu- 
scripts, which would have been written on papyri, and must 
have been few and costly. He was a great traveller and a 
diligent inquirer, and obtained a considerable part of his infor- 
mation from w r hat he saw with his own eyes, and heard from 
persons acquainted with the facts. He tells us that he sifted 
and compared conflicting statements, and he often rejected 
stories which he did not think he had warrant for believing. 
But it is curious that in some cases his scepticism is now known 
to have been wrong. Thus he disbelieves the story of the circum- 
navigation of Africa by the Phoenicians in the seventh century 
