DEPARTMENT OP HISTORICAL RESEARCH. Ill 



pagne," the first being wholly in his field, the second containing large amounts 

 of material relating to it. He has also completed, at the Ministry of War, 

 his examination of the principal series in the Archives Historiques, Ancien- 

 nes. Assistants employed by him have meanwhile searched at the Archives 

 Nationales the papers of the legislative committees and the police in the 

 Revolutionary and Napoleonic period and have examined for him parts of 

 the manuscript material in the Bibliotheque Nationale. 



Mr. Leland is making, as was explained a year ago, an inventory marked 

 by a somewhat higher degree of explicitness than most of these manuals in 

 our series. That his laborious task is not yet completed is due partly to the 

 natural expansiveness of such pieces of work, partly to the proposed re- 

 moval and transfer of the archives of the Ministry of the Colonies, and 

 partly to the fact that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has extended from 

 1830 to 1848 the date down to which the examination of its archives is per- 

 mitted, an action very gratifying in itself, but one which makes a large addi- 

 tion to the amount of material to be inspected. As Mr. Leland must on 

 other accounts return to America in November, 1909, another expedition, 

 to finish the book, must be made in 1910. 



Professor Bolton has found that the pressure of his work at the Univer- 

 sity of Texas during the past academic year and that which has resulted from 

 his call to Leland Stanford University have made it impossible for him to 

 complete all the manuscript of his report on the Mexican archives examined 

 during the period of the last report. It is understood, however, to be nearly 

 finished. He has completed the searches themselves by examining the 

 archives of three present-day or former provincial capitals in northern Mex- 

 ico — Monterey, Saltillo, and Monclova — in which large materials for 

 United States history were found. 



Prof. Carl R. Fish, of the University of Wisconsin, spent the year, from 

 October to June, in Rome making a guide to the materials for American his- 

 tory in the archives of that city. The field was one of exceptional interest, 

 including as it did the records and papers arising from the general relations 

 of the Catholic Church to America, those of missionary organization and en- 

 terprise, those arising from the diplomatic position and activities of the Curia, 

 and the secular archives and libraries of the Kingdom of Italy; and it was 

 a field hitherto but very little worked for American purposes. 



Mr. Fish seems to have received every needed facility for his work. There 

 is no narrowness in Rome in such matters, and since the opening of the 

 Vatican archives by the late Pope in 1880 freedom of access has been the 

 rule. An exception was apprehended in the case of the archives of the Con- 

 gregation of the Propaganda. This collection, of the greatest importance 

 for American history, was open to scholars for some ten years in the period 

 directly after the opening of the archives of the Vatican, but subsequently, 

 for administrative reasons, access was almost entirely cut off. Mr. Fish, 



8— YB 



