e same type will either verify or discredit.

On the other hand, in his _Descent of Man_, Darwin, discussing the role
of sexual selection in evolution of the species, makes this observation:
"Naturalists are much divided with respect to the object of the singing
of birds. Few more careful observers ever lived than Montagu, and he
maintained that the 'males of songbirds and of many others do not in
general search for the female, but, on the contrary, their business in
spring is to perch on some conspicuous spot, breathing out their full
and amorous notes, which, by instinct, the female knows and repairs to
the spot to choose her mate.'"

This is a typical statement of a fact of natural history. It is not,
however, the rather vague generality of the statement that makes it
scientific. It is its representative character, the character which
makes it possible of verification by further observation which makes it
a scientific fact.

It is from facts of this kind, collected, compared, and classified,
irrespective of time or place, that the more general conclusions are
drawn, upon which Darwin based his theory of the "descent of man." This
theory, as Darwin conceived it, was not an _interpretation_ of the facts
but an _explanation_.

The relation between history and sociology, as well as the manner in
which the more abstract social sciences have risen out of the more
concrete, may be illustrated by a comparison between history and
geography. Geography as a science is concerned with the visible world,
the earth, its location in space, the distribution of the land masses,
and of the plants, animals, and peoples upon its surface. The order, at
least the fundamental order, which it seeks and finds among the objects
it investigates is _spatial_. As soon as the geographer begins to
compare and classify the plants, the animals, and the peoples with
which he comes in contact, geography passes over into the special
sciences, i.e., botany, zoology, and anthropology.

History, on the other hand, is concerned with a world of events. Not
everything that happened, to be sure, is history, but every event that
ever was or ever will be significant is history.

Geography attempts to reproduce for us the visible world as it exists in
space; history, on the contrary, seeks to re-create for us in the
present the significance of the past. As soon as historians seek to take
events out of their historical setting, that is to say, out of their