These instances are taken at random; there is no need to multiply them. It is well known to experts, and to some who are much less than experts, that the condition of our corporation records throughout the land is very far more satisfactory than was suspected a few years ago, and that every year more and more attention is being bestowed upon them, more vigilance displayed in their preservation, and more zeal and earnestness exhibited in the patient study of their contents. Every year the number of intelligent explorers of our municipal and other local archives is steadily increasing, which means that every year the study of our history is being more laboriously pursued by specialists. For the rest, the whole field is felt to be too vast to travel through in the present state of our knowledge. But just as great laws and great generalizations in physical science have been made, and could only have been made, by the devotion of students concentrating their attention upon a single branch of physiology, chemistry, or astronomy, and registering the conclusions--that is, the certainties--which their several researches have arrived at, so must it be with history; there, too, research must be carried on by men who will be content to labour in a limited area and to deal with problems which cease to be insignificant when their bearing upon larger questions is recognized and the results of one man’s toil are affiliated to those of another’s. But if this be so, if indeed the history of England of the future will be the outcome of what may be called the experimental and departmental method of research, it is obvious that the examination of the enormous body of evidence now at our command must be carried on by _local inquiries_. Only so can slight hints and faint clues be apprehended, the local customs and dialects understood, and the very names of places and persons detected in their various disguises. But what we have found ourselves led to suspect when we were dealing with the various collections of records now dispersed in the great hiding-places of London--namely, that sooner or later we shall have to group those records in departmental archives--this we are irresistibly compelled to believe we shall sooner or later have to do with the large masses of historic MSS. which are scattered broadcast over the island from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s House.