INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF HISTORY

history of a country, certainly, at any rate, in the case of the Empire; in 1845 Zumpt defended a very complicated eclectic system of this kind. In 1847 Mommsen still rejected the geographical arrangement except for municipal inscriptions, and in 1852, when he published the Inscriptions of the Kingdom of Naples, he had not entirely changed his opinion. It was only on being charged by the Academy of Berlin with the publication of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, that, grown wise by experience, he rejected even the exceptions proposed by Egger in the case of the general history of a province, and thought it his duty to keep to the geographical arrangement pure and simple." And yet, considering the nature of epigraphic documents, the arrangement according to place was the only rational one. This has been amply demonstrated for more than fifty years; but collectors of inscriptions did not come to an agreement on the subject till after two centuries of tentative efforts in different directions. For two centuries collections of Latin inscriptions have been made without any perception of the fact that "to group inscriptions according to their subjects is much the same thing as to publish an edition of Cicero in which his speeches, treatises, and letters should be cut up and the fragments arranged according to their subject-matter;" that "epigraphic monuments belonging to the same territory mutually explain each other when placed side by side;" and, lastly, that "while it is all but impossible to range in order of subject-matter a hundred thousand inscriptions nearly all of which belong to several categories; on the other hand, each monument has but one place, and a very definite place, in the geographical order."