Americana

COLUMBUS on his return voyage took abundant precautions that the credit of his exploit should be preserved. He encased an account of it in wax, and, placing this in a barrel, threw it overboard. He put another copy, similarly protected, on his vessel’s poop, to be washed off in case his ship went down. Just before making the Azores he duplicated, in substance, these other accounts, which have never since been heard of, and addressed the new draft to the treasurer of Aragon. This letter seems to have been printed very soon after Columbus reached land, either at Lisbon or somewhere in Spain, for a single copy turned up not a great many years ago in Italy. Still another letter was addressed by him at the same time to Sanchez, the crown treasurer, the Spanish text of which has come down to us in several forms; and from this, it is thought, the Latin translation was made by one Aliander de Cosco, which, being taken to Italy by two Genoese ambassadors very soon after the return of Columbus to Spain, appeared in Rome, France, Germany, and Flanders in eight different editions within the next twelve months or more. Thus promptly after the discovery of the New World, either in Latin or in Spanish, and in five of the principal countries of western Europe, these nine separate issues constituted the beginnings of a class of literature which book-lovers have learned to call Americana, and which in less than four centuries has grown to such an extent that the mere enumeration of its titles, judging from the progress which is making in Sabin’s Dictionary of Books relating to America, is likely to require thirty octavo volumes to contain them. It is to trace the development of this accumulation, and to indicate some of the influences which have assisted in it and some of the results which have accrued, that the present essay is attempted.

More than a century and a quarter had passed from that moonlit October night when Columbus, on mere pretense and with a lack of magnanimity not common, let us be thankful, in lordly characters, deprived a poor sailor of his reward for first seeing land, to that other night, when, in a storm which had carried away their mast, a sturdy crew, magnanimous if not lordly, struggling at their oars, barely escaped breakers, and found at last comparative quiet under the lee of an island in the harbor of New Plymouth. Everything that is in contrast in the spirit of widely severed faiths and purposes characterizes the actors in these two scenes, as well as everything that puts asunder the calm tropical sea from the foreboding desolation of a northern coast. The interval which this contrast spans had seen the Spanish Catholic possess island and main of the western hemisphere and establish presses, whose productions in printed laws, chronicles, and doctrines were the first accessions from the New World itself to the products of the then numerous presses in Seville, Antwerp, London, Paris, Nuremberg, and Rome, to name no other places, which were adding more and more, as the years of the sixteenth century went on, to the world’s knowledge of what had been done and found beyond the Atlantic. The explorations and conquests of Spaniards from the verge of the northern temperate zone to the land’s end at the south ; the adventures of the Portuguese, who found scarce any limit north and south to their daring; of the uncertain French, who dropped on the coast here and there, Romanist as well as Huguenot ; of the sturdy English, finding fishing grounds, appearing suddenly and departing, raking Spanish towns, and on the whole more fortunate during this interval in turning pirate than in founding colonies ; and strangely above all, of the Italian sailors of fortune,— Columbus, Cabot, Vespucius, Verrazano, for example, — leading other peoples, and giving to the crowns of Spain, France, and England prescriptive rights to the shores of a world where Italy herself failed to acquire the merest foothold, — these were the events which the presses of the Old and New World were now commemorating. Perhaps this record was in some history like Herrera’s ; more often in the little black-letter quarto, that told of special exploits, as of Cortes, Magellan, or Drake ; necessarily in the newer editions of the old cosmological writers like Ptolemy and Pomponius Mela, or in the contemporary geographers like Münster and Apian, in such cartographers as Mercator and Ortelius, or in descriptions like those of Acosta and Monardes. Such was the diversified extent of the novel kind of literature which the new era of navigation had engendered, and which gave to Ferdinand Columbus the material to help form the wonderful library which he left to the cathedral of Seville, and whose losses by depredations have been so recently made the subject of Harrisse’s investigations. These were the books which in the sixteenth century were gathered into monasteries, were talked about in the colleges and universities, caused comment at courts, were passed about in the seaboard towns, and were sent as revelations to Augsburg and Cracow; but no one, up to the time of the landing of the English at Plymouth, had thought, so far as we now know, of making lists to measure the extent of the new form of literature which that age of discovery had created.

In 1622, Draudius gave a section of his Bibliotheca Classica to what he calls “De scriptoribus rerum Americanarum,” and the bibliography of Americana began then. Georg Draud, as he called himself when he was not writing Latin, was a German, who has the credit of being the earliest to give bibliography an intelligible plan. The next effort came from a people who had not been conspicuous in the New World’s history. Johann De Laet had lived in the Dutch colony on the Hudson, and when he published his Nieuwe Wereldt, in 1627, he could find no more than thirty-seven authorities to enumerate.

Something very like the spirit of the dog in the manger characterized the Spaniards during their career of American discovery. Governmental edicts prevented the publication of their charts, lest rival nations should benefit from their pioneering. Except for chance manuscript maps of the Spaniards, which have come down to us, we should know very little of the cartographical triumphs which they were attaining. We get it conjecturally, indeed, in a printed form ; for there were Flemish map-makers, who knew the way to smuggle across the Pyrenees data from the Spanish hydrographical office, as we discover from the great map associated with the name of Sebastian Cabot, the single copy of which, now preserved in Paris, would indicate that the Spanish government had power to suppress even what got for a while beyond their reach. So it is not surprising that the Germans and the Dutch got ahead in the bibliographical way, and that the first Spanish record of this kind should have emanated from the New World itself, for Læon y Pinelo was a native Peruvian. His Epitome de la Biblioteca Oriental i Occidental was published at Madrid in 1629, and, after the fashion of the day, we are confronted with a copper-plate title, showing the East in a figure armed with a scimiter and supported by an elephant, while for the West, or America, the effigy stands on an alligator and has the inevitable cap of feathers, the bow and arrow. In the list of divisions of the western world which is spread above her head, “ De la Florida ” is the only and comprehensive indication of North America, which even down to this date the Spaniards included by that name within their prescriptive rights. The book is not a large one, but the compiler made the most of his opportunities as the royal chronicler of the Indies.

It was forty years and more before as much was done for that part of the continent where the Spanish claim was hardly valid enough for an attempt to enforce their authority, and where the Dutch and the English were not quite agreed as to their respective rights. New York had already fallen into English hands, though the Dutch hopes of recapture were not abandoned, when Van den Bergh, the Dutchman, who is better known by his Latin alternative, Montanus, published his Nieuwe Weereld, in 1670, and gave Dapper the German and Ogilby the Englishman the opportunity to supply their countrymen with all that Montanus knew, and what they could add to it, in renderings into their vernaculars. These books interest us now, because they made bibliographical record of the extent of an American library needful at that time to construct a sort of historical and geographical cyclopædia of the New World, — which shows as its basis a list of one hundred and sixty-seven titles.

It was not, however, till 1713 that the Bibliothecæ Americanæ Primordia of White-Kennett, Bishop of Peterborough as he became, was printed, edited it is said by the well-known bibliographer, Robert Watt, and showing a collection which had been gathered for the use of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. It was the first distinctive bibliography to do justice to the literature of the English discoveries and settlements, and though the entries are sixteen hundred in number, a considerable abatement must be made from its extent, inasmuch as the sections of such works as Hakluyt and Ramusio were treated separately. It is a list that the student of New England history, particularly, scans with much care, and he is not over-pleased to find in it some entries that tell him of losses of books which it is perhaps hopeless to make good. Strange to say, the library which it represents was so completely lost sight of in the vicissitudes of the society which owned it that even special students of American history, residing in London, were surprised, when an inquisitive antiquary, a very few years ago, brought it, in its sadly dismantled condition, to the attention of scholars.

At the time this catalogue of WhiteKennett was printed, but a single library had been formed in New England, of any consequence, and with any pretension to preserve the history of the English enterprise and policy in this western world, and that was the collection associated with the name of the elder Mather, yet to be considerably increased under the care of Cotton Mather, and finally to be burned, in part at least, during the destruction of Charlestown in 1775, and in other part to be scattered, for the antiquarian gleaner to reassemble what was possible in the library of the American Antiquarian Society and elsewhere. Thomas Prince was in Europe when Kennett’s list came out. Ten years earlier, when Prince had entered Harvard College, he had set himself the task of gathering what he called a New England library. He picked up not a few books during his prolonged stay in England, and when he returned to Boston, in 1717, he had become a skillful collector. Dying in 1758, he left a library, which was very considerably depleted by some one while the British, in 1775-76, occupied the Old South Church in Boston, where it was deposited. Of what remains, New England antiquaries know the value, which is shown by the catalogue of it, printed by the Boston Public Library, as it now stands on the shelves of that institution. Of what the passions of the hour deprived us in 1765, when a frantic mob destroyed the library of Thomas Hutchinson while it gutted his house, we may never know.

The eighteenth century, while it may be said to have created the English bibliographical study of Americana, may be considered equally the fountain of the French and Italian. For the former, Lenglet du Fresnoy began with about sixty titles in 1716; and though Charlevoix did not create in 1744 a large list introductory to his history of New France, he commented upon his titles usefully for the modern student. One of the few instances in which we know the prices, during the eighteenth century, of books now deemed rare is a record of a sale of the library of the College of Clermont in 1764, when twenty volumes of the series known as the Jesuit Relations, being the annual reports of the priests in New France to the general of the order in Europe, brought eighteen francs, which may be compared with the sum of £100 which Quaritch, of London, this very month asks for a set of twenty, while Harrassowitz, of Leipsic, sold a set of twenty-six volumes for five thousand francs within a year or two.

The most conspicuous Italian example of American bibliography in the century now under consideration was the list which Clavigero added to his history of Mexico in 1780, enlarging and rendering most serviceable to scholars the enumeration which Boturini Benaduci had gathered, after eight years’ labor, in 1746.

Meanwhile the Spanish scholars were reinforcing the work of their predecessors. The edition of Garcia’s Origen de los Indias, in 1729, showed seventeen hundred authors. Ten years later Garcia improved still more upon Pinelo.

Robertson, in 1770, in his History of America, was the first Englishman to survey the whole extent of American history, and yet he was content with only two hundred and fifty titles, — a number which a professed bibliographer increased to sixteen hundred, as shown twelve years later in an anonymous Bibliotheca Americana, published in London.

The first forty years of the nineteenth century were to organize the study of Americana in a way that has guided the more extensive accumulations of the succeeding forty. The only Spanish contribution need not detain us long, but it is interesting as the earliest list, touching our subject, which was published in the New World, and this was the Bibliotheca Hispano-Americana of Beristani de Souza, printed in Mexico in 181621. It is in three volumes, and covers the writers who were born or who flourished in Spanish America, and of course includes works not relating to the country. It has become the rarest of all American bibliographical works which have been put on sale, and is worth not far from five hundred dollars to-day.

There is not a German list during these forty years worth considering, though Grahame tells us that in writing his history of the United States during the colonial period he found, in 1825, the University library at Göttingen richer in books for his purpose than all the libraries in Britain combined. It was also the example of a German professor which became so powerful during the early years of this century to direct and foster the study of American history. This was Professor Ebeling, whose American library of thirty-two hundred volumes and an extraordinary collection of maps was bought by Colonel Israel Thorndike, in 1818, for $6500, and given to the library of Harvard College. Hardly a writer on American history since, engaged upon studies antedating the present century, but has found it indispensable to sound the depths of this Ebeling collection. No list of it was ever printed, except so far as it may be included in the general catalogue of that library published in 1830-34.

Among the French, the labors of Boucher de la Richarderie and Faribault were easily eclipsed by the collection formed by Ternaux-Compans. This embraced about twelve hundred entries, all of a date before 1700, — an extent which, as Mr. Brevoort thinks, had not before been reached by any gatherer of the older books. This was in 1836, and the catalogue which described the collection, scantily supplied though it was with the notes of its learned possessor, has not yet ceased to be of great use to the student. It has been said that Ternaux formed the collection for the purpose of selling it. At all events, he took precautions to preserve the record of his bibliographical zeal, for his books, with his monogram and crest impressed on their covers, are among the much-prized nuggets of many an American library.

During these same forty years there were three Americans, working in this field, upon whom collectors have been taught to look back with great regard, and two of them, David B. Warden and Thomas Aspinwall, were respectively consuls of the United States for many years at Paris and London. These gentlemen were collectors at a time when prices of rare books were very much lower than now, and when the foundations were laid of a number of collections of Americana which have since become famous. Warden was essentially a speculator in books. The first collection which he formed embraced twelve hundred volumes, and was described, in 1820, in his Bibliotheca Americo-Septentrionalis, — the collection itself being, three years later, bought for $5000, by Mr. Samuel A. Eliot, the father of President Eliot, to be given to the library of Harvard College. At a later day, he sold a still larger collection, which he had used while working on the American portion of the Art de Værifier des Dates, to the state library at Albany. Colonel Aspinwall, whose figure in Boston streets was a very familiar one at a later period of his life, and whose empty sleeve recalled the battles on the Canadian border in the war of 1812, was a collector of great activity and vigilant tact. The catalogue of his collection which he printed in 1833 was not an extensive one, embracing only seven hundred and seventy-one entries, but he had been fortunate in the opportunities of acquiring a large part of the choicest early books. The mischances of a fire in 1863 deprive us of still possessing more than a small number of the rarest titles. The library had been sold to Mr. S. L. M. Barlow, of New York, and some of the most valuable volumes had been separated from the rest when a conflagration overtook the bulk of the collection.

Our third American of this period deserves the name, probably, of having done most to create, foster, and direct the interest in Americana at the formative stage of the passion. This was Obadiah Rich, a Boston man, who, like his contemporaries already named, derived advantages from being put in the way of a collector’s opportunities when he was sent, in 1815, as consul to Valencia, in Spain, and while later he lived at Madrid. The political unrest of Spain at that time favored this vigilant gleaner, and treasures came easily to him for small sums, which in time became almost priceless. Intelligent and kind as he was, Rich welcomed everybody to his house who sympathized with him in his bibliographical quests. Alexander H. Everett, at that time the American minister to Spain, became his intimate friend. Washington Irving found the bibliophile’s generosity ever ready to lay books before him that had before eluded his search, He was the bibliographical mentor of Ticknor, Prescott, and Bancroft. In 1827, when Rich left Spain, his collection was offered to Congress through Edward Everett; but the transaction was not completed, and its owner, in 1828, settled himself in London as a bookseller, with this admirable collection in stock. Here he soon grew to be a counselor as well as purveyor to a growing class of American booklovers, who were making the history of the western world the subject of their attention. Conspicuous among them were Colonel Aspinwall, Peter Force, James Lenox, and John Carter Brown. Rich’s catalogues, which were printed between 1832 and 1846, were the earliest issued by any of the London dealers in a manner to make them genuine bibliographical helps, and the character they rapidly attained has not been lost. They are usually reckoned as giving the starting-point in the growth of prices.

With the labors of Ternaux in France and of Rich in London, the fate of Americana, as a kind of literature alluring a distinct class of collectors and students, was at once established, and since about 1840 the passion has had constant growth. In tracing its further progress we need to recognize somewhat the motives which have induced this continued development. In the first group of abettors we might place what we may call the professional bibliographers, and it is noteworthy that the three more conspicuous members of this class have been adopted citizens of the United States. The beginning of the bibliography of American local history and American linguistics we find in the work of a German, Hermann E. Ludewig, who came to the United States in 1844. To Henry Harrisse, a FrancoAmerican citizen, we owe the Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima, whose two volumes, published respectively in 1866 and 1872, survey with more thoroughness than is done elsewhere the literature of American discovery and description previous to the middle of the sixteenth century. While Rich had given but twenty titles for this early period, and Ternaux fifty-eight, Harrisse gave over three hundred in his first volume, and added a considerable number of new ones amid the supplemental matter which makes up his second volume. No one had before so eagerly searched the old libraries of Europe for every trace to be discovered of book or chart elucidating the first half century of American history. He has given most of the information, which is available to us, of the stores, and of the depredations upon those stores, which constitute the library of Ferdinand Columbus at Seville. He has scoured the libraries of Italy, only to reach the conclusion that there is not among the public libraries of Europe any which in respect to the earliest books upon America can compare with three or four private libraries in America. In Italy he places the Marciana, at Venice, as probably the richest, and the Trivulgiana, at Milan, as perhaps the next. His book on Columbus, still incomplete, shows how thoroughly he has ransacked every crevice which might conceal a line, to throw light on the very beginnings of all our history. His books on the Cortereals, the Cabots, and on New France, taken in conjunction, illustrate the bibliography of the northern parts of North America more exhaustively than has been done elsewhere in any descriptive way for the period previous to 1700.

The third of these professional bibliographers was Joseph Sabin, who began in 1867 the great Dictionary of Books relating to America, which is likely to require the thirty volumes which have already been referred to, if the promise of the title is carried out to include all “ down to the present time.” Mr. Sabin was a London bookseller, who settled in New York, and his death, in 1881. has left others to complete the work which he began.

In a second class of contributors to the bibliographical records of America we must place those collectors of books who have gathered them for their own use, as writers of history or as students of bibliography. A new spirit was applied to the study of the early American discoveries when Humboldt published his Examen Critique on the historical geography of the New World, in 1836— 39. The collections which he formed for the writing of that monumental work are engulfed in the printed catalogue of Humboldt’s library, which Henry Stevens made when he purchased the books in 1863, and which now is the only evidence of Humboldt’s activity, since the books themselves were destroyed by fire two years later. Neither can we separate from the general catalogue of the library of Congress, which is now printing, the rich collection of Americana which Colonel Peter Force gathered, and which, after his death, became the property of the nation. Of the library of Jared Sparks we have a distinct catalogue, made after his death, and before the books were sold to Cornell University, about 1872. It is a good working library, but not a remarkable one; while the printed catalogue enumerates also the manuscripts which he had gathered, and which did not accompany the books to Ithaca, but which, under his will, were to find an ultimate deposit in the library of Harvard College. The library of James Lenox was only in part American ; but in that part rich in the rarest specimens of those books which to the sight-seer are the merest curiosities, while to the scholar they may become at times necessary to the determinate elucidation of crucial points in the study of the earliest experiences of Europeans on this continent. Before his death, in 1880, Mr. Lenox placed this collection in its own building and in the hands of trustees, for a limited public use. No catalogue of it has yet been printed, but its keepers are issuing a series of bibliographical monographs which in part pertain to its stores of rare Americana. The most famous of all collections of Americana is, without doubt, that known as the Carter Brown library. It is almost exclusively American, and the aim has been to make it as nearly complete as possible down to the year 1800. The late Mr. John Carter Brown belonged to a wellknown family in Providence, whose name had been given to what was originally Rhode Island College. He had enjoyed the sympathy and counsel of Mr. John Russell Bartlett in the gathering of his library; and under that gentleman’s care the four large octavo volumes which constitute its sumptuous catalogue have been prepared, showing not far from seven thousand titles. These volumes of its catalogue constitute what is probably the most extensive printed list of all Americana previous to 1800, more especially anterior to 1700, which now exists.

The two choicest private collections in Massachusetts are those of Dr. Charles Deane, of Cambridge, and the Rev. Dr. Henry M. Dexter, of New Bedford. Of the Deane library there is no catalogue, but it is rich in all that relates to the English discoveries and the English colonies. Of Dr. Dexter’s, so far as concerns the Congregational movement, which so largely affects the early history of the English colonies, we get the scope of it in the indications of his ownership, which are plentifully scattered through the 7250 titles that constitute the bibliography appended to his Congregationalism as seen in its Literature. He shows how poorly off our largest public libraries are in this illustrative literature when he says that of the thousand titles which he gives between 1546 and 1644, he found but 208 in American libraries. Among the private libraries of New York and its vicinity the richest are probably that of Mr. S. L. M. Barlow, who has recently printed a tentative catalogue of his collection, and that of Mr. James Carson Brevoort, of which we have no printed catalogue, and of which some considerable portion a few years since passed into the Astor Library. A collector in this department, who has only of late years been a vigorous competitor in the market of Americana, is Mr. Charles H. Kalbfleisch, who aims rather to make a collection of the rarest books than to illustrate the broad scope of American history.

The library which Mr. Hubert Howe Bancroft has gathered in San Francisco, is the basis of the enormous work which is now appearing under his own name as a history of the native races and later peoples of the Pacific coast of North America. What the scope of this book is appears from the very extensive lists which are given in various volumes of his work, duplicating, however, each other to a considerable extent.

Some of the best of the libraries of Americana which have been formed in this country during the last thirty years or more have been within ten years brought to the hammer. Such was the collection of William Menzies, sold in 1875, from a catalogue made by Joseph Sabin. It was not exclusively American, but a large share of its Americana formed the basis of the collection of Mr. J. J. Cooke, of Providence, sold more recently. The collection formed at Hartford by George Brinley shows, as Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, the maker of its catalogue, claims, “ a greater number of volumes remarkable for their rarity, value, and interest than was ever before brought together in an American sale-room.” The sales of this collection began in 1878, and the fourth or last has not yet been held. They have introduced a new device, which has already been followed in the sale of the Cooke collection. Certain libraries were selected by the testator as beneficiaries, with the privilege of buying at auction up to a certain aggregate of cost. The result was a stimulated competition, which practically saved the estate from loss to the heirs by reason of such public bequests, and produced an inflation of prices of which all later purchasers of Americana have experienced the ill effects.

The library of the late Henry C. Murphy, of Brooklyn, was formed in pursuance of a plan to write a history of maritime discovery in America, only one chapter of which, that on Verrazano, had been printed, when Mr. Murphy died in 1882. Mr. John Russell Bartlett edited the sale catalogue of the books, and the collection proved one of the richest which had ever been sold in this department. We must pass over many smaller distinctively American collections, like that of Dr. E. B. O’Callaghan, sold in 1882, and say but a final word for the largest private library which had been gathered in this country in illustration of the history and traits of the North American Indians. Mr. Thomas W. Field published in 1873 an Essay towards an Indian Bibliography, and two years later the library upon which it was based was sold by a catalogue showing 3324 titles, almost wholly in this restricted field of Americana.

Perhaps no department of our general subject has received bibliographical treatment, so nearly exhaustive in this country and in Europe, as the ethnology and linguistics of our aborigines. Without referring to the earlier tentative lists, the subject may be considered as first surveyed systematically by Schoolcraft in 1849 ; and among his followers in this direction are Squier and Brinton, and the compiler of the lists in the third volume of Hubert H. Bancroft’s Native Races. Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, in various essays, has made the Algonquin branch his own special ground. We can afford but the merest mention of the labors, among the Germans, of Buschmann and Platzmann; among the French, of Charency and Brasseur de Bourbourg; and among the Mexicans, of Romero and Icazbalceta. while for the extensive work of the latter on the bibliography of Mexican history scholars are now waiting with eagerness. But the final flower of this linguistic bibliography is the great book, as big as Webster’s Dictionary, which has been constructed, as the work of years, by Mr. Pilling, of the Bureau of Ethnology at Washington, which is to record every literary trace of the languages of aboriginal America. Special scholars have already been furnished with the work in a trial form, and in its perfected shape it cannot be kept much longer from universal scholarship.

The few distinctively American private libraries which have been formed outside of the United States have pertained to Spanish America, like those of Fischer, Beéche, and MacKenna. In Europe, Americana have made only a part of several collections, which from the rarity and richness of classes of books in this field have attracted the attention of students of American history, and such are the collections of Sobolewski, sold at Leipsic in 1873; of Pinart, Brasseur de Bourbourg, and Dr. Court, sold in Paris in 1883 and 1884; and the great Sunderland sale in London in 1881-83. So far as printed catalogues enable us to judge, the private library of the late Henry Huth in London is the one in England most likely to supply the wants of an American scholar, the foundations of it having been laid by that gentleman during a residence in Mexico.

There is one other class of practical bibliographers whose labors every student is bound to acknowledge; and these are the dealers in books who have made special exertions in the amassing of Americana. Most conspicuous among Americans has been Henry Stevens, a Vermonter and a graduate of Yale, who for many years has been a resident of London. He has been the American mentor of the British Museum, and by his vigilance that library has made its magnificent store of Americana. He has done more than most of his rivals to help their owners in the creation of the great American private libraries in this department; and his numerous printed catalogues have been made, in parts at least, interesting reading, through a quality of his annotations which combines amusement with instruction. We have no space now to enlarge upon the special efforts of such dealers as Samuel G. Drake, William Gowans, Charles B. Norton, and Joel Munsell, not to name others, among ourselves.

In England at the present time there is no one to dispute the supremacy of the chief in that Sett of Odd Volumes, as a sort of Bohemian bibliographical club in London is called, — Mr. Bernard Quaritch. No one rules the market for rare books on America, and indeed for books on all subjects, in a more lordly way than he, and his sceptre is as much felt on the Continent and in this country as in London itself. Everything somehow comes at last to No. 15 Piccadilly, and huge collections like the Sunderland, or those of the rarest like that formed by Mr. F. S. Ellis, gravitate there as easily as water to the swamps.

It is in France and Holland, however, that exclusive catalogues of Americana have been produced by booksellers, which are of the most value to students ; and highest in place among such we must name that which Charles Leclerc has made for Maisonneuve, and those which under the name of Frederick Muller have been made at Amsterdam. Work only little inferior has been done by Paul Trömel for Brockhaus, in Leipsic, where the traditions of good tradebibliography are preserved by Weigel, and by one of Muller’s pupils, Otto Harrassowitz.

It is doubtful if any place can surpass Boston as a centre of research in American history. In its own Public Library, which includes the Prince collection, in the libraries of the Massachusetts Historical Society, of the Congregational Association, of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, and of the State, supplemented by the stores of such as are within easy reach, like that of Harvard College at Cambridge, wonderfully rich in Americana as it is, and the private collection of Charles Deane ; like that of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, the peerless Carter Brown collection at Providence, and the treasures of Dr. Dexter at New Bedford, — there is an affluence of Americana most likely not elsewhere to be found, though the library of Congress with its Force collection, and the neighboring library of George Bancroft, in Washington, make the national capital, particularly if the archives of the government are to be studied, a necessary resort of the American historian. New York is not far behind, with its Lenox and Astor libraries, the collections of the New York Historical Society and the American Geographical Society, the private gatherings of Mr. Barlow, Mr. Brevoort, and Mr. Kalbfleisch, and, if a journey is undertaken, with the excellent library in the state house at Albany. The facilities of Philadelphia and Baltimore are decidedly second-class, except for local research ; there is hardly anything worth considering, for a general survey, in any of the libraries beyond the Alleghanies; and only when we come to the thither slope of the Rocky Mountains do we find in the enormous collection of Hubert Howe Bancroft any library which can be compared with the great collections of the Atlantic seaboard.

Justin Winsor.