of human history--the funeral oration of Pericles, the laws of Tiberius Gracchus, Magna Charta, the theses of Luther, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution of the United States--not to mention the all but limitless masses of histories, biographies, poems, letters, essays, memoirs, legal codes, and official records of every variety which are available for any one who seriously desires to make use of them. [Sidenote: The value of sources to the student] But why should the younger student trouble himself, or be troubled, with any of these things? Might he not get all the history he can be expected to know from books written by scholars who have given their lives to exploring, organizing, and sifting just such sources? There can be no question that schools and colleges to-day have the use of better text-books in history than have ever before been available, and that truer notions of the subject in its various relations can be had from even the most narrow devotion to these texts than could be had from the study of their predecessors a generation ago. If the object of studying history were solely to acquire facts, it would, generally speaking, be a waste of time for high school or younger college students to wander far from text-books. But, assuming that history is studied not alone for the mastery of facts but also for the broadening of culture, and for certain kinds of mental training, the properly regulated use of sources by the student himself is to be justified on at least three grounds: (1) Sources help to an understanding of the point of view of the men, and the spirit of the age under consideration. The ability to dissociate one's self from his own surroundings and habits of thinking and to put himself in the company of Caesar, of Frederick Barbarossa, or of Innocent III., as the occasion may require, is the hardest, but perhaps the most valuable, thing that the student of history can hope to get. (2) Sources add appreciably to the vividness and reality of history. However well-written the modern description of Charlemagne, for example, the student ought to find a somewhat different flavor in the account by the great Emperor's own friend and secretary, Einhard; and, similarly, Matthew Paris's picture of the raving and fuming of Frederick II. at his excommunication by Pope Gregory ought to bring the reader into a somewhat more intimate appreciation of the character of the proud German-Sicilian emperor. (3) The use of sources, in connection with the reading of secondary works, may be expected to train the student, to some extent at least, in methods of testing the accuracy of modern writers, especially when the subject in hand is one that lends itself to a variety of interpretations. In the sources the makers of history, or those who stood close to them, are allowed to speak for themselves, or for their times, and the study of such materials not only helps plant in the student's mind the conception of fairness and