As one considers the field of extant manuscripts, one is led naturally to reflect on the quality of work that was likely thus to insure perpetuity, and the more we consider the subject, limiting the view for our present purpose to historical compositions, the more clear it becomes that the one prime quality that gave a lease of life to the composition of an author was the quality of human interest. In other words, such historical compositions as were works of art, rather than such as depended upon other merits, were the ones which successive generations of copyists reproduced, and which ultimately were enabled to pass the final ordeal imposed by the monks of the middle ages, who made palimpsests of many an author deserving a better fate. The upshot of this process of the survival of the fittest was that all Greek would-be historians prior to Herodotus were allowed to sink into oblivion, causing Herodotus himself to stand out as apparently the absolute creator of a new art. In point of fact, could we know the whole truth, it would doubtless appear that there was no real revolution of method effected by the writings of Herodotus. He surpassed all of his predecessors in such a measure that the future copyist saw no necessity for preserving any work but the one, since this one practically covered the field of all the rest. It is, perhaps, an ill method of phrasing, to say that these copyists saw no reason for preserving those earlier manuscripts. There was no thought in their minds of the preservation of one book and the destruction of another; they merely copied the work which interested them, or which they believed would interest the book-buying public. The disappearance of the works not copied was a mere negative result, about which no one directly concerned himself.