The business of the modern historian is to survey with comprehensive eye, to digest, to reduce to proper dimensions, and with a skillful hand to mold his materials into the form of pleasing yet faithful narration; that of the primitive historian was rather to transcribe what was most important from the existing documents of the day. [...] He [Eusebius] was at least faithful to his purpose by culling, [...], the appropriate extracts from ancient writers.
-- C. F. Cruse in his 1850 "Preface by the Translator" in Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History reprinted in 1998 by Hendrickson Publishers, Inc.

[NOTE: It is extremely important that period writings are examined in the context of their period and also of their author as a man or woman from that same period. To impose modern notions of the discipline of scientific history (as Cruse calls it) on ancient historians is to decide a priori to misunderstand the writing.]