History, if we define it as the mere transcription of the written records of former generations, can go no farther back than the time such records were first made, no farther than the art of writing. But now that we have come to recognize the great earth itself as a story-book, as a keeper of records buried one beneath the other, confused and half obliterated, yet not wholly beyond our comprehension, now the historian may fairly be allowed to speak of a far earlier day. For unmeasured and immeasurable centuries man lived on earth a creature so little removed from "the beasts that die," so little superior to them, that he has left no clearer record than they of his presence here. From the dry bones of an extinct mammoth or a plesiosaur, Cuvier reconstructed the entire animal and described its habits and its home. So, too, looking on an ancient, strange, scarce human skull, dug from the deeper strata beneath our feet, anatomists tell us that the owner was a man indeed, but one little better than an ape. A few æons later this creature leaves among his bones chipped flints that narrow to a point; and the archæologist, taking up the tale, explains that man has become tool-using, he has become intelligent beyond all the other animals of earth. Physically he is but a mite amid the beast monsters that surround him, but by value of his brain he conquers them. He has begun his career of mastery.

The History of England is David Hume's great work on the history of England, which he wrote in while he was librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh. It was published in six volumes. The History spanned "from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688" and went through over 100 editions. Contents: The Britons. The Romans. The Britons. The Saxons. The Heptarchy The Kingdom of Kent The Kingdom of Northumberland The Kingdom of East Anglia The Kingdom of Mercia The Kingdom of Essex. The Kingdom of Sussex. The Kingdom of Wessex. Egbert. Ethelwolf. Ethelbald and Ethelbert. Ethered Alfred. Edward the Elder. Athelstan. Edmund. Edred Edwy Edgar Edward the Martyr Ethelred Edmond Ironside Canute Harold Harefoot Hardicanute Edward the Confessor Harold William the Conqueror. Henry III. Edward I. Edward II. Edward III. Richard II. Henry IV Henry V. Henry VI. Edward IV. Edward V. And Richard III. Richard III. William Rufus. Henry I. Stephen. Henry II. Richard I. John. The Feudal and Anglo-Norman Government and Manners Henry Vii. Henry Viii. Edward Vi. Mary. Elizabeth. James I. Charles I. The Commonwealth Charles II. James II.

When david hume began his History of England the undertaking came, not from any sudden resolve nor as an entirely new enterprise, but as one possibly contemplated thirteen years before, in 1739, probably attempted several times thereafter, and certainly considered, at least as a corollary discipline, in a philosophical discourse published in 1748. Even so, any concerted effort long sustained necessarily awaited appropriate conditions: all happily combining for Hume upon his election, January, 1752, as Keeper of the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh. With this appointment the author finally had “a genteel-office,” ready access to a collection of some thirty thousand volumes, and, no less desirable, leisure indefinitely extended to pursue his research. Heretofore, by mere exertion of his own commanding intellect, philosopher Hume had more than once set forth what he perceived to be the “constant and universal principles of human nature.” Now, as a philosophical historian, he could ascertain from dreary chronicles all the aberrations of human behavior as there exhibited in “wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions.” These and other vagaries, previously recorded simply as odd phenomena, in Hume’s more coherent view constituted a varied range of “materials” documenting the “science of man.”