The system has now been abandoned of grouping documents in a _Corpus_ or in _regesta_, as was done formerly, because they have the common characteristic of being unedited, or possibly for the exactly opposite reason. At one time the compilers of _Analecta, Reliquiæ manuscriptorum_, "treasuries of _anecdota_," _spicilegia_, and so on, used to publish all the documents of a certain class which had the common feature of being unedited and of appearing interesting to them; on the other hand, Georgisch (_Regesta Chronologico-diplomatica_), Bréquigny (_Table chronologique des diplômes, chartes et actes imprimés concernant l'histoire de France_), Wauters (_Table chronologique des chartes et diplômes imprimés concernant l'histoire de Belgique_), have grouped together all the documents of a certain species which had the common character of having been printed. [98] J. P. Waltzing, _Recueil général des inscriptions latines_ (Louvain, 1892, 8vo), p. 41. [99] Ibid. When the geographical order is adopted, a difficulty arises from the fact that the origin of certain documents is unknown; many inscriptions preserved in museums have been brought there no one knows whence. The difficulty is analogous to that which results, for chronological _regesta_, from documents without date. [100] Here the only difficulty arises in the case of documents whose _incipit_ has been lost. In the eighteenth century Séguier devoted a great part of his life to the construction of a catalogue, in the alphabetical order of the _incipit_, of the Latin inscriptions, to the number of 50,000, which had at that time been published: he searched through some twelve thousand works. This vast compilation has remained unpublished and useless. Before undertaking work of such magnitude it is well to make sure that it is on a rational plan, and that the labour--the hard and thankless labour--will not be wasted. [101] See G. Waitz, _Ueber die Herausgabe und Bearbeitung von Regesten_, in the _Historische Zeitschrift_, xl. (1878), pp. 280-95. [102] In the absence of a predetermined logical order, and when the chronological order is not suitable, it is sometimes an advantage to provisionally group the documents (that is, the slips) in the alphabetical order of the words chosen as headings (_Schlagwörter_). This is what is called the "dictionary system." [103] See Langlois, _Manuel de bibliographie historique_, i. p. 88. [104] This argument is easy to develop, and often has been, recently by M. J. Bédier, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, February 15, 1894, pp. 932 _sqq._