distinction of being the first to undertake a universal history. Christianity, with its doctrine of the unity of mankind, and with all the moral and religious teaching characteristic of the gospel, contributed effectively to the widening of the view of the office and scope of history. It is only in quite recent times that history has directed its attention predominantly to _social progress_, and to its causes and conditions. History, in its etymological sense (from the Greek, historia), meant the ascertaining of facts by inquiry; then, the results of this inquiry, the knowledge thus obtained. The work of Herodotus was "history" in the strictest sense: he acquired his information by travel and personal interrogation. The German philosopher, _Hegel_, has divided histories into three classes: 1. _Original histories_; i.e., works written by contemporaries of the events described, who share in the spirit of the times, and may have personally taken part in the transactions. Such are the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon's Anabasis, Clarendon's History of the Great Rebellion in England, Caesar's Commentaries. 2. _Reflective histories_, where the author writes at a later point of time, on the basis of materials which he gathers up, but is not himself a partaker in the spirit of the age of which he treats. 3. _Philosophical histories_, which set forth the rational development of history in its inmost idea. Another classification is the following: 1. _Genealogies_, like the records of Manetho, the Egyptian priest. 2. _The chronicle_, following the chronological order, and telling the story in a simple, popular way. 3. _The "pragmatic"_ form of writing, which aims to explain by reference to the past some particular characteristic or phase of the present, and uses history to point a special moral lesson. 4. The form of history which traces the rise and progress of "_ideas_," tendencies, or ruling forces,--such as the idea of civil equality in early Rome or in modern France, the religious ideas of Mohammedanism, the idea of representative government, the idea of German unity, etc.