Excerpt from Travels and Settlements of Early Man: A Study of the Origins of Human ProgressThe French have a popular use of the word histoire in which it signifies a narrative that is untrue. This is a good illustration of the extent to which a term may side-slip from the middle of its meaning. For history is not properly a narrative and the task of the historian begins with the exclusion of material which is unauthentic. Pressed home to its ultimate derivation the Greek historia stands for the judgment of a man who is wise, because he has seen. Herodotus and Aristotle while preserving this essential meaning elaborated its application, the former by defining the character of the material to be visualized, the latter by expanding the form of the judgment. For Herodotus the data of history consisted of facts within the human reference. Aristotle, when he entitled histories those researches which he pursued in biology and psychology in order to ascertain the nature of living things and of the soul, established the canon that history must proceed beyond the collection and Verification of facts to their interpretation by means of a coherent hypothesis.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.