The question has been raised, For how long can oral tradition be trusted? Newton was of opinion that it might be trusted for eighty years after the event. Others have named forty years. But if this means that we may believe a story that we find in circulation forty years after the alleged events, it is wildly extravagant. It does injustice to the Mythop[oe]ic Faculty of man. The period of time that suffices for the creation of a full-blown myth, must be measured by hours rather than by years. I will give an instance from my own observation, if that has not been entirely discredited by my previous confessions. The bazaars of the East are generally supposed to be the peculiar home of myth, hotbeds in which myths grow with the most amazing speed, but the locality of my myth is Aberdeen. In the summer of 1887 our town set up in one of its steeples a very fine carillon of Belgian bells. There was much public excitement over the event: the descriptions of enthusiastic promoters had prepared us to hear silvery music floating all over the town and filling the whole air. On the day fixed for the inauguration, four hours after the time announced for the first ceremonial peal, not having heard the bells, I was in a shop and asked if anything had happened to put off the ceremony. "Yes," I was told; "there had been an accident; they had not been properly hung, and when the wife of the Lord Provost had taken hold of a string to give the first pull, the whole machinery had come down." As a matter of fact all that had happened was that the sound of the bells was faint, barely audible a hundred yards from the belfry, and not at all like what had been expected. There were hundreds of people in the streets, and the myth had originated somehow among those who had not heard what they went out to hear. The shop where it was repeated circumstantially to me was in the main street, not more than a quarter of a mile from where the carillon had been played in the hearing of a large but disappointed crowd. I could not help reflecting that if I had been a mediaeval chronicler, I should have gone home and recorded the story, which continued to circulate for some days in spite of the newspapers: and two hundred years hence no historian would have ventured to challenge the truth of the contemporary evidence. III.--METHOD OF TESTING TRADITIONAL EVIDENCE. It is obvious that the tests applied to descriptive testimony in Courts of Law cannot be applied to the assertions of History. It is a supreme canon of historical evidence that only the statements of contemporaries can be admitted: but most even of their statements must rest on hearsay, and even when the historian professes to have been an eye-witness, the range of his observation is necessarily limited, and he cannot be put into the witness-box and cross-examined. Is there then no way of ascertaining historical fact? Must we reject history as altogether unworthy of credit?