Savigny makes the same charge against one class of historians in his own
country:--"However discordant," says he, "their other doctrines may
appear, they agree in the practice of adopting each a particular system,
and in viewing all historical evidence as so many proofs of its truth."

Were it not for that contempt we have already noticed as the offspring
of pride and dogmatism, and which, in the administration of the republic
of letters, has been entertained and openly proclaimed for every kind of
history except that which its own acts may have originated, we should
have been in possession of thousands of facts and notions now overlaid
and lost irrecoverably to the philosopher and the historian.

The origin and the progress of nations, next after the school divinity
of the Middle Ages, has occasioned the most copious outpouring of
conjectural criticism. The simple mode of research suggested by the
works of Verstegan, Camden, and Spelman would, long before this time,
have made the early history of the British tribes as clear as it is now
obscure. Analogies in the primary sounds of each dialect; similarity or
difference in regard to objects of the first, or of a common necessity;
rules or laws for the succession of property, which are as various as
the tribes which overran the empire; the nature, agreement, or
dissimilarity in religious worship with those vestiges of its ritual and
celebration which, by the "pious frauds" and connivance of the early
church, still lurk in the pastimes of our rural districts:--the new
science of which we have spoken, by taking cognisance of these and all
other existing sources of legitimate investigation, will settle the
source and affinities of nations upon a plan as much superior to that of
Grotius and his school as fact and reason exceed the guess-work of the
theorist and the historian. Meantime we would cite a few examples that
illustrate and bear more particularly on the subject to which our