Next the proportions of the structure, the number of floors and of rooms to each floor; the relative size and dimensions of the various departments; or, in book terms, the proportionate number of volumes or pages to be given to each important department of history: so many volumes to the Old Orient; so many to the Classical World; so many to the Middle Ages; so many to the important divisions of modern history. All this, let it be repeated, was accurately predetermined before a single block of material was explicitly selected for the building. It does not follow that absolutely no changes have ever been made in the original plan--no architect perhaps ever made a building of which this was quite true; but it is true that the original plan was so carefully thought out, so well considered, that the changes are utterly insignificant in comparison with the unmodified portions of the structure. This point should be emphasised and clearly borne in mind, because upon it depends a large measure of our confidence that we have produced a structure not without artistic and correct proportions. It was the predetermination of the proportions, and this alone, that could control the enthusiasm of unrestrained specialism, and keep to anything like a true historical perspective. Over and over again it has been proved that the special worker, when he came to focus upon a given period, was in the position of a microscopist, viewing his wonderfully interesting microcosm. All the rest of the world shut out for the moment, the little circle of the microscopic field, which may be in reality one hundredth of an inch in diameter, looms before the view at an angle which literally makes it seem to eclipse the world itself. And so the historical delver, when he finds himself in the midst of the literature on any period whatever--be it a mere historical mole-hill--finds himself surrounded by a heap of literary bricks which shuts out the very mountain ranges of history from his vision. At once he demands--feels that he must have--space for his magnified mole-hill; and it is only the predetermined editorial restrictions that keep him from filling entire volumes with fascinating stories about some petty kingdom which, from the world-historical standpoint, is entitled to pages only. It is a conservative estimate of the facts to assert that there is no period of our history for which ten times the amount of material has not been garnered than could possibly be used in _extenso_. The chart of the architect has lain always open upon the editorial desk, and rule and compass have been ever ready to restrain and check the over-enthusiasm of the worker whose zeal would otherwise lead him to present megaliths where the specification called for, and the plan permitted, only tiny bricks.