admirable portraits by Scheffer may be seen on the walls of the Lafayette family in France, and a duplicate original is in the Representatives' Chamber, at Washington, presented by Scheffer himself.

Then we have in our own gallery the portrait of him, as a young officer, painted for Mr. Jefferson at the time of his first coming over here to take part in our Revolutionary struggle.

But there is another sketch of him as a very young man, portraying him as he stood at the head of the American troops, during that Virginia campaign which he conducted so skilfully in 1781, before Washington came to his aid, and before the Siege of Yorktown was commenced.

sketch, he has a map in his hand, inscribed " Map of Virginia," betokening the peculiar interest and pride which he took in that campaign. It is an aquarelle, or water-color, and belonged to Madame de Lafayette, by whom it was bequeathed to her daughter, Madame de Latour Maubourg, and is now in Turin, in the possession of her granddaughter, Madame la Baronne de Perron Saint Martin. It has always been prized in the family as the one most resembling the young hero at the time of the Virginia campaign.

A carefully taken photograph, improved by India ink from the original, was kindly given me by Madame de Corcelle, a granddaughter of Lafayette, while I was passing some delightful days with her and M. de Corcelle, a former French Ambassador at Rome, at Beau-fossé, in Normandy.

This little sketch might well be heliotyped for our volumes, as furnishing an illustration of Lafayette in his earliest maturity, which is not only interesting in itself, but which may be valuable to the sculptor who shall be selected hereafter to prepare a statue of him for some one of our public squares.

I may not forget, in this connection, a most agreeable visit to La Grange, the old residence of Lafayette in France, where the Count de Lasteyrie, his grandson, now a senator of France, with his family, took pains to gratify my disposition to see whatever was associated with the life and memory of the good Marquis. There was his library, just as he left it, and, close at hand, the little room in which he died, in 1834. There were his farm books, in which, like Washington, he made careful entries of agricultural operations and accounts, almost to the last day of his life. And in the hall there were two small cannon which had been presented to him by the city of Paris, in August, 1830, and which had been rendered

doubly interesting by their recent rescue from the Prussian soldiery through the heroism of the Countess de Lasteyrie.

But I may not dwell longer on these visits, or upon others in France and in England, visits to Chantilly and Hatfield House, the splendid seats of the Duc d'Aumale and of the Marquis of Salisbury, with their magnificent parks and avenues, and with all their marvellous treasures of art and literaI confine myself to those which had some peculiarly American association or interest, worthy of mention in our historical records.

Let me now hasten, without further delay, to call for communications from the Second Section.

Mr. DEANE read a paper on the "Old Patent of Connecticut," so called, from the Earl of Warwick to Lord Saye and Sele and others, of the year 1632, and read some extracts from the recently recovered portions of the records of the Council of New England, which he thought tended to deepen the suspicion respecting this old patent.

Mr. WINSOR, in laying a map on the table, said :—

This map appeared in, and is called for in the title of, the third edition of Edward Williams's tract, "Virgo Triumphans" (1650), which, under the changed title of "Virginia in America Richly Valued," appeared in London in 1651. The map is a curious instance of the kind of geographical knowledge which either prevailed in England in the middle of that century, or could be made credible. The map is very rare, but is known in two states of the plate, the first without a vignette portrait of Sir Francis Drake, with fewer names, and with the inscription, John Farrer collegit; the second with the vignette, more names, and the inscription altered to Domina Virginia Farrer collegit. Are to be sold by I. Stephenson at ye Sunn below Ludgate, 1651. The title of the tract speaks of it as "a compleat map of the country. . . and the west sea;" and the map itself bears for a title: "A mapp of Virginia discovered to ye hills, and in its Latt: From 55 deg: & neer Florida to 41. deg: bounds of new England." The hills are seen in a range, running athwart the map (for the north is to the right) and it may stand for the Appalachians seen from the east, and for the Sierra Nevadas seen from the west, involving a complete annihilation of the great Mississippi Valley, if nothing more, which, to be sure, Marquette had not yet dis

covered, but which some geographers, certainly for a century, had had due conception of, so far as it represented a great breadth of the continent. This bringing of the two coasts of America so near together as to be equally distant from each other as the capes of the Chesapeake and Hudson's River are, is the strange feature of the map; and it is intensified by the legend, which is placed upon the coast of the Pacific, called "The Sea of China and the Indies," and which reads thus: "Sir Francis Drake was on this sea and landed Ano 1577 [should be 1578] in 37 deg. where hee tooke Possession in the name of Q. Eliza. Calling it new Albion. Whose happy Shoers (in ten dayes march with 50 foote and 30 horsmen from the head of Ieames River, over those hills and through the rich adiacent vallyes, beauty fied with as proffitable rivers which necessarily must run into yt peacefull Indian sea) may be discovered to the exceeding benefit of Great Brittain and joye of all true English." And so the "James his river," Yorke," "Toppehanak," and "Pataomak" are made to rise on the eastern slope of these hills; and so also does the Delaware further north, and the rivers of "Rawliana," or North Carolina. The Hudson is given a turn to the west and intersects Canada fl." [St. Lawrence] at "Beavar Ile," just west of which is "a Mighty great Lake," opening into the Pacific; but the designer, as if he had a certain qualm of conscience,— which does not always trouble our modern railway companies, whose maps show their own road to be always the shortest distance between two points, -intercepts the through flow of the waters by a curious sort of land-bridge, enough to indicate a certain indistinctness of conception.

It is difficult to conceive any Englishman, out of Bedlam, holding these geographical views in 1651; but land companies are proverbial for bright imaginations, and to reduce the continent to the width of a few hundred miles is one of their signal feats. John Speed, the royal geographer, had this very year produced his map of the world, in which an approximate idea of the width of the continent was displayed, notwithstanding the incomplete St. Lawrence and Hudson's Bay; and a break in the coast line of California pointed to an interior watershed of which no one yet knew anything.

But, as we have seen, there was a woman in the case; and we may readily pardon the sex's lightsome fancy, even if so speculative a man as her father, John Farrer, of Geding, indorsed it; and this John Farrer is thought to be the author of the tract, upon the title of which he got Williams to put his initials, "E. W." Farrer seems to have had a disposition

to stalk under others' clothes, for, we have also seen, the first state of this plate represented it as his work. He had intended the map to make up a deficiency in the first edition of the tract, which he thought needed some such exposition, as it did with such geographical notions. Quaritch, a few years ago, offered for sale a copy of this tract, with Farrer's notes, and inserted in it was what was claimed to be the original drawing from which the map was engraved by John Goddard.

I had long searched for the map (to which I had found references in Neill's "Virginia Company," p. 191; Huth Catalogue, v. p. 1595; Quaritch's Catalogue, No. 12,536; Major's edition of Strachey's "Virginia"; Armstrong's paper on " The Site of Fort Nassau"; while Force, who reprints an early edition of the tract, gives no clew to the map), when Professor Gregory B. Keen, the Corresponding Secretary of the Pennsylvania Historical Society, drew my attention to a copy of it owned by Mr. John Cadwalader, of Philadelphia, by whose kind permission a tracing was made, as its condition did not admit of a satisfactory photographic negative. The original is 10 x 13 inches, and the present fac-simile, by a photoelectrotype process, is somewhat reduced.

Captain Gustavus V. Fox, of Washington, D. C., was elected a Corresponding Member.

The President announced that the Council had appointed Mr. Deane to be Chairman of the Committee on the Publication of the Trumbull Papers, in place of Mr. Winsor, who asked to be excused from serving; and Messrs. Whitmore, J. R. Lowell, Hill, and A. B. Ellis, a Committee to superintend the publication of the Sewall Correspondence.

Dr. JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE read a note to the "Historical Sketch of Charlestown," printed in the Second Series of the Society's Collections, vol. ii. p. 166, in which an account is given of the poisoning of Captain John Codman by three negro servants in 1743, and which is as follows:

"The servants were Mark, Phillis, and Phoebe, who were favorite domestics. The man procured the drug, and the women administered it. Mark was hanged, and Phillis was burnt at the usual place of execution in Cambridge. Phoebe, who was said to have been the most culpable, became evidence against the others. She was transported to the West Indies. The body of Mark was suspended in irons on the northerly side of Cambridge road, about a quarter of a mile above our peninsula, and the gibbet remained till a short time before the Revolution."

Dr. CLARKE asked if the story was authentic, and if so, whether there were any other instances of persons being burned or gibbeted in Massachusetts.

Dr. ELLIS thought the story was authentic, and he then spoke of the pains taken to keep in remembrance any unhappy events in the history of New England, as compared with the oblivion into which similar transactions were allowed to fall elsewhere. He said that in the "Negro Plot" panics in New York in 1712 and 1741 more lives were sacrificed than by the witchcraft delusion in Massachusetts; that fourteen persons were burned and eighteen were hanged.

Dr. PAIGE said that Professor John Winthrop, of Harvard College, mentions in his diary having witnessed the burning of Phillis.

An interesting conversation followed, in which Messrs. Ellis, Deane, Holmes, Paige, Haynes, and other members took part. It was observed that the offence was petit treason, for which, as well as for high treason, women were then punishable by burning; and that the punishment in this case was not therefore, as had been asserted, an indignity inflicted because the criminal was a negro slave. It was also said that Increase Mather mentions the burning of a woman at Roxbury in 1681.*

The thanks of the Society were voted to Mr. Dexter and the Committee on Publication for their services in preparing the last volume of Proceedings.

* See further on this subject, Mr. Goodell's paper read at the March meeting, post 122,-EDS.

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