g a sane man, he has never dreamed of searching
them from beginning to end: he has turned over a few of them, that is
all; he knows that each of these fields of research would afford a
labour of several years, and that all of them would fill the better part
of his life with drudgery. As for oral testimony and manuscripts, he
will gather a few unpublished anecdotes in chance conversations; he will
obtain access to a few family papers; all this will appear in his book
as notes and authorities. Now and again he will get hold of a few
documentary curiosities among the state archives, but as it would take
fifteen years to master the whole collection, he will naturally be
content to glean a little here and there. Then he begins to write. He
does not feel called upon to inform the public that he has not seen
_all_ the documents; on the contrary, he makes the most of what he has
been able to procure in the course of twenty-five years of industrious
research.

[38] Some dispense with personal search by invoking the assistance of
the functionaries charged with the administration of depositories of
documents; the indispensable search is, in these cases, conducted by the
functionaries instead of by the public. Cf. _Bouvard et Pecuchet_, p.
158. Bouvard and Pecuchet resolve to write the life of the Duke of
Angouleme; for this purpose "they determined to spend several days at
the municipal library of Caen to make researches. The librarian placed
general histories and pamphlets at their disposal...."

[39] These considerations have already been presented and developed in
the _Revue universitaire_, 1894, i. p. 321 _sqq._

[40] It is well known that, since the opening of the Papal Archives,
several governments and learned societies have established Institutes at
Rome, the members of which are, for the most part, occupied in
cataloguing and making known the documents of these archives, in
co-operation with the functionaries of the Vatican. The French School at
Rome, the Austrian Institute, the Prussian Institute, the Polish
Mission, the Institute of the "Goerresgesellschaft," Belgian, Danish,
Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and other scholars, have performed, and
are performing, cataloguing work of considerable extent in the archives
of the Vatican.

[41] Catalogues of documents sometimes, but not always, mention the fact
that such and such a document has been edited, dealt with critically,
utilised. The generally received rule is that