78 
ments of stories, passages of books, . . . . and the like, do save 
and recover much from the deluge of time.’’ 
A historical society should be a ‘‘snapper up of unconsidered tri- 
fles, and should not disdain to gather even the bubbles that float on 
the stream of current history, prizing them as the world will one 
day prize the gems into which they will be transferred by the magic 
of time.’? There are thousands of printed documents of one kind 
and another which féw persons think of saving, but which if pre- 
served and systematically arrauged into sets become valuable for 
reference in a very few years, and this is a kind of work requiring 
painstaking and patience, rather than the expenditure of much 
money. ‘The breaking up of private collections is the great oppor- 
tunity of the historical librarians and members, who should always 
be on the alert for such chances. No scrap which contains a word 
or name or date of historic value should be allowed to be destroyed 
or to be thrown into the rag bag or sold to the gatherer of materials 
for the paper mill. 
Whilst the American antiquarian must necessarily feel deeply 
concerned in whatever relates to the history of the aborigines of our 
country, and we all know to what extent that subject has been illus- 
trated, especially in the Government publications, yet it is not the 
history of the Indians in our respective States that has engaged the 
special attention of our historical societies—though not entirely 
overlooked, especially by the societies in the Western and newer 
States—our main purpose is to rescue from oblivion the history of 
the first settlers of the country, the manners, habits, opinions, 
deeds, primitive institutions, the early establishments, their family 
papers, their schools and churches, parish records or newspapers 
and books, their roads, their country frolics, their holidays and di- 
versions, their civil and social condition, their town meetings and 
country fairs, their old family pictures, their great men and noble 
women in every department of active life. It is literally carrying 
out the capital motto of the Maine Historical Society, ‘‘ Antiquita- 
tis monumenta colligere.’’ 
It is the province of the societies to collect and safely keep ac- 
count of all these and of many other things. A historical society 
need and should not collect a library of miscellaneous books, nor 
spend any money on an ornamental picture gallery or a museum of 
curiosities which do not illustrate the history of the State. If such 
objects are donated to the society as decorations, and the society 
