than the greatest traveller of antiquity could gather from the priests of Sais. In tracing the history of history we must therefore keep in mind the double aspect. History itself, this double subject, the science and the art combined, begins with the dawn of memory and the invention of speech. It is wrong to term those ages _pre-historic_ whose history has not come down to us, including in one category the pre-literary age and the literary whose traces have been lost. Even the pre-literary had its history, first in myth and then in saga. The saga, or epos, was a great advance upon the myth, for in it the deeds of men replace or tend to replace the deeds of the gods. But we are still largely in the realm of imagination. Poetry, as Thucydides complained, is a most imperfect medium for fact. The bard will exaggerate or distort his story. True history, as a record of what really has happened, first reached maturity in prose. Therefore, although much of the past has been handed down to us in epic, in ballad and in the legends of folk-lore, we must turn from them to what became history in the narrower sense. The earliest prose origins of history are the inscriptions. Their inadequacy is evident from two standpoints. Their permanence depends not upon their importance, but upon the durability of the substance on which they are inscribed. A note for a wedding ring baked into the clay of Babylon has been preserved, while the history of the greatest events has perished. In the second place they are sealed to all but those who know how to read them, and so they lie forgotten for centuries while oral tradition flourishes,--being within the reach of every man. It is only recently that archaeology, turning from the field of art, has undertaken to interpret for us this first written history. The process by which the modern fits together all the obtainable remains of an antiquity, and reconstructs even that past which left no written record, lies outside the field of this article. But such enlargement of the field of history is a modern scientific product, and is to be distinguished from the imperfect beginnings of history-writing which the archaeologist is able to decipher. Next to the inscriptions,--sometimes identical with them,--are the early chronicles. These are of various kinds. Family chronicles preserved the memory of heroic ancestors whose deeds in the earliest age would have passed into the keeping of the bards. Such family archives were perhaps the main source for Roman historians. But they are not confined to Rome or Greece. Genealogies also pass from the bald verse, which was the vehicle for oral transmission, to such elaborate tables as those in which Manetho has preserved the dynasties of Egyptian Pharaohs.