142 CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON. 



paring a map showing the results of the presidential election of 1916, 

 in the same manner as that employed in the case of previous electoral 

 contests. 



In the concluding weeks of the period reported upon, a beginning 

 has been made in the case of another aid to research which it is hoped 

 may prove serviceable to many investigators in American history. 

 The manuscript materials in Europe for that history are to be found 

 in repositories of two sorts — archives and the manuscript departments 

 of libraries. Into the former, papers bearing on American history 

 have come for the most part in continuous series, in the ordinary 

 course of public business relating to America, colonial or independent; 

 into the latter they have most commonly come singly or casually. It 

 is therefore a much more difficult, time-consuming, and expensive 

 process to list exhaustively the manuscript materials for American 

 history preserved in European libraries than to prepare, as has been 

 done in our series of "Guides," a relatively adequate "first-aid" treat- 

 ment of archive materials of similar bearing. It happens that, for 

 reasons deemed sufficient to warrant the exception, we have done it 

 in the case of the libraries of London, Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, and 

 Rome. But to do it for all the libraries of Europe, and especially for 

 the multitudes of small provincial or local libraries in which some 

 very small number of manuscripts relating to America may lurk among 

 hundreds or thousands of others, like the proverbial needle in the hay- 

 stack, would call for such a prodigious effort, so great a consumption 

 of time and money, that, if we may not say that the Institution could 

 never afford it, at least we may confidently declare that it must stand 

 relatively late among our undertakings, and that its completion could 

 not be expected by the present generation of scholars. 



Meanwhile, however, a "first-aid" procedure is possible, which 

 would enable us to "serve the present age" by presenting before long 

 a considerable share of the data which a complete search would dis- 

 close. Many of these libraries have in past times printed catalogues 

 of their manuscript treasures, either as separate volumes or as appen- 

 dices to their catalogues of printed books. The searcher of one of 

 these catalogues will perhaps come upon a stray item describing some 

 manuscript bearing on American history, but it is most likely some- 

 thing for which he personally has no use, "not in his period," and 

 there are hundreds of such catalogues, and probably no student of 

 American history has ever searched them all. A library in a French 

 provincial capital contains one American manuscript, a long memoir 

 by General Turreau of his mission to the United States, which almost 

 certainly no student of Jefferson's diplomacy has ever seen. The 

 library of one of the Swiss cantons contains an illustrated journal of 

 travel in Virginia by one of the earliest foreign travelers in that colony, 

 a manuscript which no American seems to have seen till a few years 



