RECORD (

See also:

• LAT

Lat. recordari, to recall to mind, from

See also:

• COR

cor,

See also:

• HEART
• HEART, LUNG

heart or mind)  , a verb or noun used in various senses, all derived from the original one of preserving something permanently in memory . In this article, however, we are only concerned with documentary records, or archives . In its accurate sense a record is a document regularly drawn up for a legal or administrative purpose and preserved in proper custody to perpetuate the memory of the transaction described in it; for the most part it forms a link in a complicated process, and unless the connexion between it and the other documents making up the process has been preserved, a portion of its meaning will have perished . The first care, therefore, of the custodian of records should be to preserve this connexion, where it exists . In the majority of countries a previous task awaits him; it has been his duty to collect and arrange his documents . There are few countries in which records have not passed through a period of neglect; each office of state has kept or rather neglected its own papers; each court of justice has been the keeper of its own records; the student has been paralysed by a multitude of repositories among which he vainly sought the documents he required . To this stage two systems have succeeded; the system of centralization both of records and of 1898), a thoughtful study of the political geography of the Far is regulated by the Indictable Offences Act 1848 (II & 12 Vict . East and its possible changes; " La Perse " (Bul . Soc . Neuchateloise, 1899); " La Phenicie et les Pheniciens " (ibid., 1900); La Chine et la diplomatic europeenne (" L'Humanite nouvelle " series, 1900); L'Enseignement de la geographic (Instit . Geograph. de Bruxelles, No . 5, 1901) .

Shortly before his

death Reclus had completed L'Homme et la terre, in which he set the crown on his previous greater works by considering man in his development relative to geographical environment . Reclus died at Thourout, near Bruges, on the 4th of July 1905 .