their way and vainly exhaust themselves in such a career, especially when they have good reason for believing that they might have employed their talents to better advantage in other directions.
II. As critical and preparatory tasks are remarkably well suited to the temperament of a very large number of Germans, and as the activity of German erudition during the present century has been enormous, it is to Germany that we must go for the best cases of those mental deformations which are produced, in the long run, by the habitual practice of external criticism. Hardly a year passes but complaints are heard, in and about the German universities, of the ill effects produced on scholars by the tasks of criticism.
In 1890, Herr Philippi, as Rector of the University of Giessen, forcibly deplored the chasm which, as he said, is opening between preparatory criticism and general culture: textual criticism loses itself in insignificant minutiæ; scholars collate for the mere pleasure of collating; infinite precautions are employed in the restoration of worthless documents; it is thus evident that "more importance is attached to the materials of study than to its intellectual results." The Rector of Giessen sees in the diffuse style of German scholars and in the bitterness of their polemical writings an effect of the habit they have contracted of "excessive preoccupation with little things." In the same year the same note was sounded, at the University of Bâle, by Herr J. v. Pflugk-Harttung. "The highest branches of historical science are despised," says this author in his Geschichtsbetrachtungen: "all that is valued is microscopic observations and absolute accuracy in unimportant details. The criticism of texts and sources has become a branch of sport: the