HISTORICAL METHOD. This term is used in a variety of meanings which have not much in common. Sometimes it denotes the whole complex of methods employed in historical investigations, a subject being said to be treated by the historical method when an historical account is given of it. Sometimes a subject is said to be treated by the historical method when all that is given is a chronological survey of the different views that have been entertained about it. By an ambiguity not altogether unnatural the term "historical method" is also used instead of "evolutionary method" or "genetic method" or even "comparative method," although the story of the development of a natural species, etc., has not the chronological character of a "history" in the strict sense. Perhaps a vague reminiscence of the older use of the term "history" is partly responsible for the loose employment of the term "historical method." Originally "history" meant any kind of descriptive account of a thing, and this use still survives in the expression "natural history," to say nothing of the titles of various classics of science from Aristotle's "History of Animals" to Bacon's and Boyle's "histories" of all sorts of non-historical subjects. J. S. Mill, again, used the term "historical method" in quite another and peculiar sense, applying it to that form of the combined method of deduction and induction (or the De ductive-Inductive Method) in which the facts are first investi gated inductively, and the result then confirmed by deductive reasoning from the nature of the case and in the light of truths already accepted. See SCIENTIFIC METHOD; A. Wolf, Essentials of Scientific Method (1928) ; J. S. Mill, A System of Logic (189o, etc.) .