860 CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON. 



Osgood, Herbert L., Columbia University, New York. Completion of an 

 institutional history of the American colonies during the period of the 

 French wars. (For previous reports see Year Books Nos. 11-14.) 



Work on the "Institutional History of the American Colonies" 

 has progressed steadily during the year, and comparative study of 

 the thirteen colonies is approaching completion. New Jersey and 

 Pennsylvania are the only colonies upon v^hich much remains to be 

 done. Dr. Elmer B. Russell, my assistant, has completed the exam- 

 ination of manuscript and printed materials in all of the Southern 

 States and in Pennsylvania and has also gone through a large collec- 

 tion of pamphlets in the New York Pubhc Library. The collection 

 of material in this country will soon be completed. Between forty 

 and fifty chapters have been written, either wholly or in part, but it 

 will not be possible to publish anything until the British side of the 

 subject is more fully investigated, 



LITERATURE. 



Bergen, Henry, Brooklyn, New York. Research Associate in Early English 

 Literature. (For previous reports see Year Books Nos. 11-14.) 



During 1916 I have brought down the revision of the Glossary of 

 Lydgate's Troy Book to the point reached by the latest part issued 

 of the Oxford Dictionary (this will probably be half-way through the 

 letter U) and have completed the final revision for the press of the 

 text of Lydgate's Fall of Princes. I first intended the Troy Book 

 Glossary to be, hke all the glossaries appended to works issued by the 

 Early EngUsh Text Society — simply a hst of the more difficult and 

 unusual words, together with their definitions. As the Oxford 

 Dictionary was well under way when I began to collect the material, 

 I naturally turned to it as my chief source of information; but during 

 the course of this early work I found that several words in the Troy 

 Book were not represented in the dictionary at all; that others, 

 having been cited from the comparatively late and inaccurate printed 

 editions were wTongly classified, and it turned out on further investi- 

 gation that certain constructions and many specific uses of words 

 employed by Lydgate in his Troy Book were registered in the diction- 

 ary as having made their earliest documented appearance in the 

 language in texts which in many instances had been written one or 

 two centuries after Lydgate's death. For this reason I thought it 

 would be well to broaden the scope of the Glossary and to include 

 in it all the words used by Lydgate in the Troy Book, together with 

 as many examples of their different meanings and constructions as 

 I could conveniently gather, in the hope that in addition to furnishing 

 material for the study of the language of the period, it might serve 

 as a foundation for a complete Lydgate glossary and perhaps prove 

 to be of some value to the editors of the Oxford Dictionary when the 

 time came for issuing a supplementary volume. This necessitated a 



