THE RETROSPECT OF THE YEAR. 17 



has been for years a desideratum with visitors at the Es- 

 sex Institute, and several books of no mean pretensions 

 have been furnished of late by private enterprise. One 

 of these has alread}'' reached its thirty-second thousand 

 and has enjoyed the commendation of critical journals in 

 remote sections of the country. It has seemed advisable, 

 this year, for the Institute to assume the publication of 

 such a guide. For this purpose the valuable accumulation 

 of material in the " Visitor's Guide " has been placed at 

 the service of the Institute and, largely extended and re- 

 vised with care under the supervision of the committee, 

 it will be issued at once and will bear the imprint of the 

 Essex Institute, It is thought to be as free from inaccu- 

 racies as is fairly to be expected. Such errors as may 

 linger in it, will, as they are discovered and pointed out, 

 disappear in subsequent editions. 



The committee are unable to close this retrospect of the 

 year without alluding to a new element of Institute work 

 which has come to their notice, and which seems to them 

 to be of rich promise for the future. The class of ladies 

 who have taken up, as a recreation, the pursuit of local 

 history and antiquities, embodying the results of their re- 

 search in a series of short, carefully written and well-con- 

 structed papers, have been pleased to place these at the 

 service of the Essex Institute for reference or publication. 

 While some of the best of them, from the necessity of the 

 case, are made up largely of material already to be found 

 in our pages and are therefore of no value to us, as contri- 

 butions to our collections, commensurate with their lit- 

 erary quality, there are others, and these not a few, 

 containing original features of marked merit, — some new 

 mode of treatment of a familiar topic, — some new light 

 thrown on a cons})icuous character, — some new view of an 

 event heretofore regarded from an ill-selected standpoint, 



ESSEX INST. BULLETIN VOL. XX\^I 3 



