What substantial difference can ever be discovered on the one hand between geological stratifications and the remains of vegetables and animals, of which it is possible to construct a prospective and indeed a serial arrangement, but which it is never possible to rethink in the living dialectic of their genesis, and on the other hand the relics of what is called human history, and not only that called prehistorical, but even the historical documents of our history of yesterday, which we have forgotten and no longer understand, and which we can certainly classify and arrange in a series, and build castles in the air about or allow our fancies to wander among, but which it is no longer possible really to think again? Both cases, which have been arbitrarily distinguished, are reducible to one single case. Even in what is called 'human history' there exists a 'natural history,' and what is called 'natural history' also was once 'human' history--that is to say, spiritual, although to us who have left it so far behind it seems to be almost foreign, so mummified and mechanicized has it become, if we glance at it but summarily and from the outside. Do you wish to understand the true history of a Ligurian or Sicilian neolithic man? First of all, try if it be possible to make yourself mentally into a Ligurian or Sicilian neolithic man; and if it be not possible, or you do not care to do this, content yourself with describing and classifying and arranging in a series the skulls, the utensils, and the inscriptions belonging to those neolithic peoples. Do you wish to understand the history of a blade of grass? First and foremost, try to make yourself into a blade of grass, and if you do not succeed, content yourself with analysing the parts and even with disposing them in a kind of imaginative history. This leads to the idea from which I started in making these observations about historiography, as to history being _contemporary_ history and chronicle being past history. We take advantage of the idea and at the same time confirm that truth by solving with its aid the antithesis between a history that is 'history' and a 'history of nature,' which, although it is history, was supposed to obey laws strangely at variance with those of the only history. It solves this antithesis by placing the second in the lower rank of _pseudo-history._ [1] By the economist Professor Gotti, at the seventh congress of German historians, held at Heidelberg. The lecture can be read in print under the anything but clear or exact title of _Die Grenzen der Geschichte_ (Leipzig, Duncker u. Humblot, 1904). APPENDIX I ATTESTED EVIDENCE