no REPORTS OF INVESTIGATIONS AND PROJECTS. 



WORK OF THE PAST YEAR. 

 REPORTS, AIDS, AND GUIDES. 



At the date of the last report the Institution was about to issue the "Guide 

 to the manuscript materials for the history of the United States to 1783, in 

 the British Museum, in minor London archives, and in the libraries of Oxford 

 and Cambridge," by Prof. Charles M. Andrews and Miss Frances G. Daven- 

 port. This book, a substantial volume of 513 pages, was brought out in Feb- 

 ruary, 1909. Its character was sufficiently described a year ago. It is pleas- 

 ant to be able to report that its plan and execution have met with favorable 

 criticism ; an appreciation especially valued was that contributed by Prof. 

 Herbert L. Osgood, of Columbia University, to the July number of the 

 American Historical Review (xiv, 829). 



Probably the next most important of our enterprises in foreign archives is 

 the endeavor which Mr. Leland, of our staff, has been making to compile a 

 guide to the materials for the history of the United States and Canada, which 

 are to be found in the various archives of Paris. Shortly after the date of 

 the last report Mr. Leland returned from his first expedition, after a stay of 

 seventeen months in that city. It was seen that a second expedition of several 

 months would be requisite. 



The reasons, briefly stated, were that the French archive-materials are in 

 several different depositories, as is the case with those of Washington, not 

 concentrated, as the British archive-materials are, in one general Public Rec- 

 ord Ofifice ; secondly, that, because of the large amount of data which, for one 

 portion of the field, the Canadian Archive Branch has already published, a 

 summary description would mark too little of an advance upon what we al- 

 ready possess for that portion, and a fuller description of all portions could 

 be constructed with relatively little additional labor; thirdly, that the rela- 

 tions of France to the British colonies in America and to the United States 

 in their earlier years were in general not such as leave in archives a deposit 

 of long series or large masses of uniform matter, capable of adequate descrip- 

 tion in few words, but, on the contrary, were such that the papers referring 

 to them, while numerous, are mostly embedded in series of papers not mainly 

 American, so that the American papers have almost to be listed. 



Accordingly, Mr. Leland, after a winter spent partly in the office-work of 

 the Carnegie Institution, but mostly in that of the American Historical As- 

 sociation, of which he was elected secretary at Christmas-time, proceeded 

 again to Paris in the latter part of June. He has spent July and the three en- 

 suing months chiefly among the manuscripts of the Bibliotheque Nationale 

 and in the Archives des Affaires fitrangeres. In the former he at first de- 

 voted himself especially to the extensive collections of Pierre Margry ; in the 

 latter the chief objects of his attention have been the series called "Cor- 

 respondance Politique, £tats-Unis," and "Correspondance Politique, Es- 



