To cite but a single instance, the bibliography of early English history, down to about the year 1485, as recently collated by Professor Gross, comprises a large volume of small type. It would be the work of a lifetime for any specialist to deal, even in a cursory way, with each and every one of the works cited in this list; yet this is only one little corner of the field which the world historian must cover. Obviously, then, the world historian, if he attempt personally to construct a narrative of the entire subject, must content himself with a more or less superficial glance at each field; his reading may indeed be wide, but it cannot by any possibility be exhaustive. Moreover, in the nature of the case, he must often read merely to gather material for the day’s task of writing, and no matter what his memory, he will inevitably forget the greater part of the multitudinous details that he has dealt with. In the case of a man of such wide scholarship and such tenacity of purpose as Dr. Weber, it must be freely admitted that a view of the entire range of world history may be attained, which it would be rank injustice to pronounce really superficial. Yet even such a worker as Weber must have depended very largely upon second-hand epitomes for his facts. He cannot have read at first hand more than a fraction of the authors upon whom he is obliged explicitly or inferentially to pass judgment. In a word, great as is the value of works of the class of which Weber’s is the finest example, such works must, in the very nature of the case, be content to be ranked as more or less successful compilations, lacking the authority which the modern critic is unwilling to vouchsafe to anything but strictly original work,--original work, that is, in the sense of work based upon a first-hand examination of the most remote authorities, the only sense in which the word “original” can properly be applied to any form of historical composition. If we turn from world histories of the one-man type to those produced by a symposium of specialists, we are met with a quite different, but none the less insistent, series of inherent defects. In the first place, the intrinsic defect of the one-man treatment is not altogether overcome, since specialism has nowadays been carried to such a stage that few men feel altogether at home outside a comparatively limited period, even of the history of a single nation. If, then, one man is asked to write the entire history of, let us say, the Greeks, he necessarily passes over ground that his special studies have not covered uniformly, and in certain periods he must feel himself more or less in the position of the general historian. It would, of course, be possible to meet this objection by having a sufficient number of writers, so that each limited period should be covered by a true specialist; but the great difficulty in such a scheme as this is the entire lack of harmony of view that must pertain to such a work.