The old man would say to me, for instance, “Hunt in the Middle Ages for common but shining truths about roads and bridges. Ah yes! There’s the fact that many bridges were property owners; their landed estates were sometimes inconsiderable, to be sure, like the noble parks of Lilliput; but each estate, whether large or small, was a great truth in the history of bridges. And I like to remember the good folk who in their wills bequeathed money to their favourite bridges, like Count Neville, who in 1440 left twenty pounds to ‘Ulshawe Bridge,’ near Middleham. Now and then the testator was a skinflint, like John Danby, who in 1444 left in his will a beggarly six and eightpence to ‘Warleby Bridge.’ Yes, and he was rash enough to die unrepentant. Another man, a notable merchant in his day, Roger Thornton, of Newcastle, was clever enough to save himself from oblivion, a merchant’s destiny, by leaving a hundred marks to the Tyne Bridge in his native town--a bridge, by the way, that needed much renovation. But Thornton in his charity struck a hard bargain: the hundred marks would not be paid unless the ‘mair and ye comyns’ released the testator from certain actions at law! Thornton died in 1429; and to show you that the beautiful truth which I am illustrating was not then historically juvenile, I will mention an earlier fact from the life of a Newcastle citizen, John Cooke by name, who in 1379 bequeathed twenty marks to the fortified bridge at Warkworth.” The old man gossiped quaintly about his “truths,” but when he wrote about them he was legal in profuse entanglements. Then it seemed to him that truth could not be protected by too many fortifications. Had he looked upon facts as facts, mere things which had happened and which had no future, his antiquarian knowledge would have been less arid. But he belonged to a school of pedants--the same school which either kills antiquarian magazines or enables them to live obscurely on unpaid contributions. That a man’s lifework should be futile to the public, a mere cemetery where facts lie buried like fossils in a rock, is pitiful; yet antiquaries are very proud of their barren labour. Scarcely one of them understands that a fact, however entertaining, has no value to thought unless it is a useful item in a mass of corroborative evidence; and even then it can be nothing more than a fact, a thing to illustrate the perpetual action of an absolute truth, or the increasing worth of a given hypothesis, or the general belief in a given theory. Two or three facts that confirm each other justify a guess, a random “shot,” or a vague suspicion; an important collection of such facts, if it continues to grow, gives validity to a hypothesis; and when from many sources as various as they are many new facts are added year after year to the collection, until at last the cumulative evidence holds the field with the best judges, then we know that the hypothesis has been developed into a theory, the highest form of mobile