IHE general idea of history, to most people, would be a book, or perhaps an Act of Parliament, or an inscription, or possibly hieroglyphics.
All that only concerns the last few centuries, or at most the last few thousand years of Man.
What we still need to recover is the last 10,000 years of man's -handiwork, and the last 100,000 years of man's bodily structure, and we have but made a beginning in this direction, writes Sir Flinders Petrie, F.R.S., F.B.A., in "Discovery."
The discovery of such history is a matter of picking up thousands of facts, linking them together, looking for the missing connexions, and framing a united view. This truffle hunting is an Art, a personal instinct which must be trained, to imagine what are the likely sources. The various ways in which all this is recovered constitute the Art of Discovery,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.