PREFACE.

While we are rejoicing over the great achievement of the day in the transmission of intelligence by electricity between distant continents and our own, it may be interesting to note the advantages of our predecessors in this respect, in less progressive times. The City Records in this volume embrace the period between the years 1726 and 1731. At that time and for many years afterwards, it will be found that in cases of emergency, when it was necessary to have speedy communication with New York, the authorities still sent off their despatches by a canoe. The Notes from the Newspapers embrace about the same period of time a century later, when the winged messenger of news was the steam boat. These no longer boasted of going through by daylight, they now made the passage in a little more than nine hours. How much more rapidly improvements and discoveries go forward, we are able to comprehend in reviewing the

achievements of the last quarter of a century. It is no longer doubted that we shall soon have intelligence from all parts of the earth, of its daily occurrences, on the same day in which they happen.

Since personal history is becoming more particularly the object of research, to satisfy genealogical inquiry, among other things, the scanty gleanings we have been able to make from the resources whence these pages are drawn, will be found not wholly profitless. Their scantiness, however, should serve to teach the living the importance of more suitable memorials for those who are continually departing. The remembrance of men perishes almost as soon as their bodies, and the care of friends provides only a brief inscription upon a tombstone. The newspapers are convenient receptacles for suitable mementos, yet they are seldom to be found there. A single line under the obituary head, often without date, or age, not unfrequently merely a formal invitation to attend a funeral, is all the hint we have of their departure. If it were an object to cap the remembrance of their exit with an extinguisher, it could hardly be more gracefully done. Forced to rely upon such imperfect records, the obituary notices which we have to offer, are often necessarily unsatisfactory.

We have from time to time published the opinions and