Index Coronat Opus

THE great collection of Jesuit Relations, which, under the competent editorial control of Mr. Reuben Gold Thwaites, has been growing through a space of five years, has now come to a prosperous completion in two volumes of singularly admirable index.¹ It is not necessary to say much here of the monumental comprehensiveness or the careful precision and accuracy of the substantive work. The researches of Mr. Thwaites and his assistants have drained a wide area. They have brought together a vast body of Latin, French, and Italian texts, and have furnished close yet readable translations. The collection will of course be indispensable to any writer on colonial history, while to the diligent general reader the romantic interest of many of the Relations should be very great. Finally, be it said not too loudly, the more painstaking and wholesome sort of historical novelist should find here a wealth of material quite ready for his assiduous hand.

The index, which has just been published, is a fitting finish to the long set. The darkling, subterranean work of the index-maker is so often passed in silence that it is a particular pleasure to comment on the excellence of this. Occupying nearly eight hundred pages, arranged under headings and subheadings, with cross-references like those of a dictionary catalogue in a library, with an excellent system of typography, by which the references to major passages are in blackfaced numerals, it would be hard to conceive a more complete and efficient piece of compilation. It has, indeed, something of that almost æsthetic value which is inseparable from balance and harmony of parts, while it is so opulent in detail that the “ index-raker,” if any of that ancient order now survives, should reap from it a rich harvest.

It is a cause for gratulation that there should be published in America, just at this time, a work like this, which will not suffer by comparison with the publications of the pace-makers in historical scholarship, like the Hakluyt Society in England.