DEPARTMENT OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH. 141 



in Paris, under his direction, to make considerable progress toward 

 the final completion of his collection of data. 



At the beginning of October 1917, Mrs. N. M. Miller Surrey had 

 begun a large undertaking aUied to the completing of this Paris 

 guide. During the years which Mr. Leland had spent in accumulating 

 notes for the latter work, and by a partly similar process, data had 

 been gathered, at the cost of a group of Western historical societies 

 and similar institutions, for the making of a calendar of all the papers 

 in Paris archives and Ubraries bearing on the history of the Mississippi 

 Valley. This Department having assumed the remaining stages of 

 the preparation of this calendar, the stages subsequent to the first 

 process of taking notes, Mrs. Surrey has been engaged to edit the 

 notes, bring them into a uniform text, compare dupUcates, distinguish 

 originals from transcripts when possible, and otherwise make the work 

 ready for publication. Meantime, however, the Library of Congress 

 has in recent years acquired for its Division of Manuscripts a large 

 mass of copies from the Paris archives embracing many of the docu- 

 ments which would be listed in the proposed calendar. It was there- 

 fore expedient that the process of preparing a uniform text from the 

 notes taken by the searchers in Paris should include verification of 

 their condensed summaries of the documents, by means of the tran- 

 scripts of them in the Library of Congress, whenever such transcripts 

 had been acquired. Experience has shown that this process of veri- 

 fication, amounting in many cases to the making of new summaries, 

 is profitable and will tend to the reader's ultimate advantage, but 

 it consumes time. Mrs. Surrey has now nearly completed that por- 

 tion of her calendar in which such comparison with the transcripts 

 in Washington is possible. The remainder of the calendar, though 

 a larger part of the ultimate product than what has now been finished, 

 will proceed much more rapidly. 



Work on the "Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United 

 States" has of necessity proceeded slowly during the past year. Per- 

 sons of the class that would normally be called upon for assistance 

 to Dr. Paullin have been in a peculiar degree liable to calls from the 

 Government in war time. Dr. Paulhn himself, with the draftsman's 

 aid, has during the year completed two alUed series of maps and has 

 written the accompanying letterpress. One of these series exhibits, 

 on the basis of such data as can still be obtained, the growth of towns 

 in the colonial and Revolutionary periods; the other shows from 

 census to census, from 1790, the growth of urban population, at the 

 same time exhibiting the changing outlines, from decade to decade, 

 of States and Territories. Concurrently, a considerable amount of 

 progress has been made with the series of maps showing, at different 

 periods, the negro and slave population of the United States. Dr. 

 Paullin has also supplemented a series previously completed, by pre- 



