strengthened by the influence which the children of the commonwealth have carried into all sorts of channels. The original scheme of the Series did not include the feature of foot-notes for authorities, and the writer followed the plan of putting his authorities into a bibliography. It has not seemed necessary to alter the arrangement, and it has been retained as an essay toward a bibliography of the commonwealth for the further use of students.1 It is not meant to be implied that all, or nearly all, the books there named have been used exhaustively; very many of them have merely been referred to in order to keep the writer from going astray in matters on which their authors are authority and he is not. If he has, nevertheless, erred in these respects, he will feel under great obligations to those who will call his attention to the errors. The whole list is inserted in the hope that it may be of some preliminary service to those who shall further and more effectively prosecute the study of this commonwealth's great and honest work. The approaching year 1889 is the 250th anniversary (or, to adopt the modern phrase, the quarter-millennial) of the Constitution of 1639, which seems to the writer the most far-reaching political work of modern times, and from which he conceives there are direct lines of communication running down to all the great events which followed, 1 See Appendix, p. 397. -to commonwealth organization and colonial resistance, to national independence and federation, to national union and organization, and even to national self-preservation and reconstruction. During the same year the nation will celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the inauguration of its Constitution, to whose essence and expression Connecticut contributed so largely. This volume has been written in the hope that it may aid in widening the appreciation of Connecticut's first constitution, so that its birthday shall not pass without its fair share of remembrance. PRINCETON, N. J., May 1, 1887. NOTE.-The seal on the title-page is a fac-simile of that which appears on the title-page of the first revision of the laws of Con- necticut, made in 1672 and published at Cambridge, Massachu- setts, by S. Green in 1673. A discussion of the seals of Connec- ticut will be found in the Collections of the Connecticut Historical CONNECTICUT. CHAPTER I. THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF CONNECTICUT. THE story of the commonwealth of Connecticut is one which is not strongly marked by the romantic element. Here are no witchcraft delusions or persecuted Quakers, no doughty paladins or high-souled Indian maidens, no drowsy burghers or wooden-legged governors, — only laborious and single-minded men building a new state on a new soil, exemplifying in the process the tendency of their race, when placed in a wilderness, to revert to the ancestral type of civil government, ignoring the excrescences which centuries have bred upon it. The record of their work need not lose value from its simplicity. Connecticut is the furthest southwest of the little group of six American commonwealths to which the popular name of New England has been attached. It is of oblong shape, its northern and southern boundaries being about eighty-eight and one hundred miles long respectively, and its |