In France geography has long been regarded as a science closely related to history. An _Agrégation_, which combines history and geography, exists at the present day, and in the _lycées_ history and geography are taught by the same professors. Many people persist in asserting the legitimacy of this combination, and even take umbrage when it is proposed to separate two branches of knowledge united, as they say, by many essential connecting links. But it would be hard to find any good reason, or any facts of experience, to prove that a professor of history, or an historian, is so much the better the more he knows of geology, oceanography, climatology, and the whole group of geographical sciences. In fact, it is with some impatience, and to no immediate advantage, that students of history work through the courses of geography which their curricula force upon them; and those students who have a real taste for geography would be very glad to throw history overboard. The artificial union of history with geography dates back, in France, to an epoch when geography was an ill-defined and ill-arranged subject, regarded by all as a negligeable branch of study. It is a relic of antiquity that we ought to get rid of at once. [47] "Historiography" is a branch of the "History of Literature;" it is the sum of the results obtained by the critics who have hitherto studied ancient historical writings, such as annals, memoirs, chronicles, biographies, and so forth. [48] This is only true under reservation; there is an instrument of research which is indispensable to all historians, to all students, whatever be the subject of their special study. History, moreover, is here in the same situation as the majority of the other sciences: all who prosecute original research, of whatever kind, need to know several living languages, those of countries where men think and work, of countries which, from the point of view of science, stand in the forefront of contemporary civilisation. In our days the cultivation of the sciences is not confined to any single country, or even to Europe. It is international. All problems, the same problems, are being studied everywhere simultaneously. It is difficult to-day, and to-morrow it will be impossible, to find a subject which can be treated without taking cognisance of works in a foreign language. Henceforth, for ancient history, Greek and Roman, a knowledge of German will be as imperative as a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Questions of strictly local history are the only ones still accessible to those who do not possess the key to foreign literatures. The great problems are beyond their reach, for the wretched and ridiculous reason that works on these problems in any language but their own are sealed books to them.