But a discipline that collects, and collects well, provides the opportunity
for analysis many time over.  In the discipline of history the nineteenth
century was a great collecting age, when scholars thought if we only could
collect all the facts we would know it all.  Since then historians of many
different stripes have devised many analytical techniques, but without the
work done to collect so much information first, the foundations of analysis
would be much weaker.  I am really just stating that museums and libraries
are more important in the long run than analysis because data is required
for analysis and not the other way round.  Better to err on the side of
collections rather than being to eager to explain everything on the basis
of current data.
 
Point taken, no body wants there work associated with the oddities involved
with every field.  On another list the field of gender studies was attacked
as nothing more than  the exultation of lesbian nuns.
 
Kenneth Gauck
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