In the first place, history may start as a mere enumeration at the beginning, and at the end, in spite of all further endeavour, may *remain* that and nothing more. That may occur in the first as well as in the second group of our division of history with regard to its relation to bodies. Take a cloud and describe its history from the beginning to the end: there would never be much more than pure description. Or take one pair of dogs and describe them and their offspring for four generations or more: I doubt if you will get beyond mere descriptions in this case either. The only step beyond a mere enumeration which we can be said to have advanced in these instances, consists in the conviction, gained at the end of the analysis, that nothing more than such an enumeration is in any way *possible*. Quite the opposite happens when “history” deals with the individual from the egg to the adult: here the whole series of historical facts is seen to form one whole. This case therefore we shall call not history, but *evolution*, an evolving of something; the word “evolution” being understood here in a much wider sense than on former occasions,[162] and *including*, for instance, the embryological alternative “evolutio” or “epigenesis.” [162] See pp. 26, 45, 54, etc. And half-way between enumeration and evolution there now stands a type of history which is more than the one and less than the other: there is a kind of intelligible connection between the consecutive historical stages and yet the concept of a whole does not come in. The geological history of a mountain or of an island is a very clear instance of this class. It is easy to see here, how what *has been* always becomes the foundation of what *will be* in the *next* phase of the historical process. There is a sort of *cumulation* of consecutive phases, the later ones being impossible without the earlier. So we shall speak of the type of “historical cumulation” as standing between evolution and bare temporal sequence. By means of historical cumulations history may fairly claim to “explain” things. We “understand” a mountain or an island in all its actual characteristics, if we know its history. This “historical understanding” rests on the fact that what first appeared as an inconceivable complex has been resolved into a sequence of single events, each of which may claim to have been explained by actually existing sciences. The complex has been explained as being, though not a real “whole,” yet a sum of singularities, every element of which is familiar.