Welsh Journals

sociological genealogy cannot at present be constructed.' Mr. Thomas concludes by suggesting that we are perhaps too optimistic when we speak of the victory of science over magic. 'The role of magic in modern society may be more extensive than we yet appreciate. Anthropologists to-day are unsympathetic to the view that magic is simply bad science If magic is to be defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then we must recognise that no society will ever be free from it.' So this great book ends, as all good history should, by making us think about our own society as well as that of pre-industrial England. CHRISTOPHER HILL Balliol College, Oxford THE ENGLISH POOR LAW, 1780-1930. By Michael E. Rose. David and Charles Sources for Social and Economic History. David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1971. Pp. 335. £ 2.75. Source books are the latest fashion in historical writing. Long-used in American universities, they are now appearing this side of the Atlantic in force. Fortified, perhaps, by the Open University's own series, British publishers are inducing many historians to take a holiday from historical narrative and analysis in order to edit extracts from documents. The hope is expressed that readers will go on to satisfy in libraries and archives an appetite for direct history aroused by the material thus presented to them. These publications are particularly useful as textbooks, since their contents fall into short sections suitable for set tasks. Moreover, if they do stimulate an appetite for historical evidence their appearance is timely. The publication by the Irish University Press of its great collected and classified edition of the British Parliamentary papers (however strangely edited) is making the richest source of nineteenth-century economic and social history more widely available than ever before. But whatever the collections of extracts may be, they are not source books. A historian's sources consist of all the contemporary material which he sifts in order to create for himself and his readers his picture of the period and the topic he has chosen to study. The publication of short extracts is really a method of writing history by means of extensive quotations. It has the advantage of conveying a contemporary flavour and an air of immediacy. It also has the danger of concealing from the inexperienced reader the fact that he can learn no more from a book of snippets than from any other secondary work. The value of each book depends largely on extensive and thorough editing and explanation, while the necessity of communicating through other people's writings may well hinder the examination and analysis of ideas and events which is a main function of the historian.