Within the present century we have witnessed not only the recovery of unhoped-for sources of knowledge, and the growth of sciences founded on painful gathering of unknown facts, but revolutions not less remarkable in the principles on which studies of every kind are founded. Comparative examination of independent facts is now the basis of all true knowledge, and the comparison grows ever wider. The slow growth of the future from the past is accepted as explaining all that has happened in our world, and the decay of all that once flourished is not less to be remembered in tracing history aright.
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