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Brooks Adams was consistent in his admonishments to historians about the necessary tools or insights they needed to possess.

However, as a practicing historian, he, himself, has left few clues to the amount of professional scholarship that he used when writing history.

In fact, if judgments are to be rendered upon the soundness of his historicism, they must be based on scanty evidence.

What evidence is available would seem to indicate that Brooks, unlike his older brother Henry, had most of the methodological vices usually found in the amateur.

A credulousness, a distaste for documentation, an uncritical reliance on contemporary accounts, and a proneness to assume a theory as true before adequate proof was provided were all evidences of his failure to comprehend the use of the scientific method or to evaluate the responsibilities of the historian to his reading public.

This is not to assume that his work was without merit, but the validity of his assumptions concerning the meaning of history must always be considered against this background of an unprofessional approach.