154 CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON. 



spend the autumn .in Paris in the work of perfecting her calendar of the papers 

 relating to Louisiana, Canada, and other colonies, in that series. She 

 reached Paris, and began work in the archives, in the concluding days of 

 August. 



Up to the first of July, Mrs. Surrey's work since the beginning of September 

 resulted in the preparation of more than 5,000 cards, the total number now 

 being 29,421 and representing nearly that number of documents. She also 

 made, for the benefit of Miss Donnan's volumes, a special calendar of papers 

 relating to the slave trade into French Louisiana, and prepared, from the 

 materials of which she has now so great a mastery, a paper on the develop- 

 ment of agriculture in the Mississippi Valley during the French regime, which 

 was read at the meeting of the American Historical Association at St. Louis 

 in December, and is to be printed in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review. 



During the first nine years of the Department's history under the present 

 director, 1905-1914, a large part of its attention was given to the work of 

 preparing guides to the materials for American history in foreign archives, 

 on the same general plan as that which is being followed in Paris, though 

 naturally an exceptional degree of elaboration was practised in the cases of 

 England, France, and Spain, whose archives contain far more American 

 material than those of any other foreign countries. In 1914, when war broke 

 out and made the conditions for work in archives unfavorable in nearly all the 

 countries of Europe, the Department had prepared, and the Institution had 

 pubhshed, a series of volumes which at the least afforded "first aid" to 

 searchers for materials for the history of the United States in the chief 

 archives of England, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Russia, 

 Canada, Mexico, and Cuba. The circuit was not complete, but there 

 remained, of countries having any serious amount of materials for American 

 history, only the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries, Scotland, Ireland, 

 and the West Indies. 



Of the archival materials in these countries last named, what little is to be 

 found, relative to America, in the General Register House of Scotland has 

 been examined, as was reported a year ago, and the notes are in hand. Some- 

 what more was found in the Public Record Office of Ireland, as was stated 

 last year, in reporting upon the expedition from London to Dublin made by 

 Professor Herbert C. Bell. Since that time, however, in the course of the 

 civil war which has been raging in Ireland, the special building in which the 

 Irish archives were preserved has been almost wholly destroyed. The de- 

 struction of the contents was not complete, but details as to its extent have 

 not yet been received. It is at any rate not at present expedient to think of 

 publishing the notes, on materials mostlycommercial in their character, which 

 Professor Bell collected. 



In Russia, on the other hand, while archives and archive materials of periods 

 prior to the communist revolution were for some time ill cared for, the vari- 

 ous political changes of recent years have given freer access to papers once 

 secluded. Professor Frank A. Colder, when in Russia on business of the 

 Hoover War Collection and the American Relief Administration, has found 

 opportunity to bring his notes concerning papers relative to American 

 history down to later dates than those represented in his Guide to Materials 

 on American History in Russian Archives, prepared under permissions ac- 



