ents without date.

[100] Here the only difficulty arises in the case of documents whose
_incipit_ has been lost. In the eighteenth century Seguier devoted a
great part of his life to the construction of a catalogue, in the
alphabetical order of the _incipit_, of the Latin inscriptions, to the
number of 50,000, which had at that time been published: he searched
through some twelve thousand works. This vast compilation has remained
unpublished and useless. Before undertaking work of such magnitude it is
well to make sure that it is on a rational plan, and that the
labour--the hard and thankless labour--will not be wasted.

[101] See G. Waitz, _Ueber die Herausgabe und Bearbeitung von Regesten_,
in the _Historische Zeitschrift_, xl. (1878), pp. 280-95.

[102] In the absence of a predetermined logical order, and when the
chronological order is not suitable, it is sometimes an advantage to
provisionally group the documents (that is, the slips) in the
alphabetical order of the words chosen as headings (_Schlagwoerter_).
This is what is called the "dictionary system."

[103] See Langlois, _Manuel de bibliographie historique_, i. p. 88.

[104] This argument is easy to develop, and often has been, recently by
M. J. Bedier, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, February 15, 1894, pp. 932
_sqq._

There are some who willingly admit that the labours of erudition are
useful, but ask impatiently whether "the editing of a text" or "the
deciphering of a Gothic parchment" is "the supreme effort of the human
mind," and whether the intellectual ability implied by the practice of
external criticism does or does not justify "all the fuss made over
those who possess it." On this question, obviously devoid of importance,
a controversy was held between M. Brunetiere, who recommended scholars
to be modest, and M. Boucherie, who insisted on their reasons for being
proud, in the pages of the _Revue des langues romanes_, 1880, vols. i
and ii.

[105] There have been men who were critics of the first water where
external criticism alone was concerned, but who never rose to the
conception of higher criticism, or to a true understanding of history.

[106] Renan, _Essais de morale et de critique_, p. 36.

[107] "If it were only for the sake of the severe mental discipline, I
should not think very highly of the philosopher who had not, at least
once in his life, worked at the elucidation of some special point"
(_L'Avenir de la science_, p. 136).