The rather
pretentious name of historical method was sometimes given to this
process of instruction, but the name smacked of German pedagogy,
and a young professor who respected neither history nor method,
and whose sole object of interest was his students' minds, fell
into trouble enough without adding to it a German parentage.
The task was doomed to failure for a reason which he could not
control. Nothing is easier than to teach historical method, but,
when learned, it has little use. History is a tangled skein that
one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled
enough; but complexity precedes evolution. The Pteraspis grins
horribly from the closed entrance. One may not begin at the
beginning, and one has but the loosest relative truths to follow
up. Adams found himself obliged to force his material into some
shape to which a method could be applied. He could think only of
law as subject; the Law School as end; and he took, as victims of
his experiment, half-a-dozen highly intelligent young men who
seemed willing to work. The course began with the beginning, as
far as the books showed a beginning in primitive man, and came
down through the Salic Franks to the Norman English. Since no
textbooks existed, the professor refused to profess, knowing no
more than his students, and the students read what they pleased
and compared their results.
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