ANNOUNCEMENTS. 
We have been requested, by many of our friends, to add to the Natu- 
ralists’ Quarterly a department where books and pamphlets relating to 
local history, genealogy and kindred subjects may be brought to notice 
and made accessible for scholars and amateurs in these special lines of 
investigation. 
Salem is an old historic town in one of the oldest counties of one of 
the oldest states of the union, and is the place where the records of 
the county of Essex are deposited. Many come here to examine these 
records, and largely on this account an establishment of this character 
would naturally be expected to take root and flourish. 
As in many of the old towns of Massachusetts, so in Salem; the 
children, from the early settlement even to the present time, have been 
wont to leave the old homestead to colonize new places, or to seek the 
centers of trade, commerce or manufactures. 
At first, steps were directed to the interior of Massachusetts and the 
banks of the Merrimac, then, the valleys of the Connecticut, the Housa- 
tonac, the Hudson, and the Mohawk to the Lakes, then scattering over 
the great basin of the Mississippi crossing over the slopes of the Rocky 
Mountains to the shores of the Pacific. 
The boundary line of the old Massachusetts Bay colony, described in 
the charter of 1629— “north, three miles north of the northernmost point 
of the Merrimac River—from ocean to ocean; south, three miles south 
of the southernmost point of Charles River—from ocean to ocean.” Little 
did the old emigrant, who was living under this charter granted by Charles 
I to Matthew Cradock, John Enclicott, John Winthrop and others, im¬ 
agine that ere the lapse of two and one-half centuries this vast territory, 
under one government divided into states and territories, would be cov¬ 
ered with a net-work of iron bands and telegraph wires, dotted with 
populous and flourishing cities and towns, the lakes and rivers teeming 
with a large and increasing inland commerce and its soil producing an 
immense quantity of agricultural and mineral wealth. 
With this growth of material prosperity, follows a development for 
the study of the fine arts, the varied sciences, literature and historic 
lore. The man of wealth, or one or more members of his family, seek 
repose in some of these elevating studies, and they, as wave after wave 
in a series of years throws them upon these places so abounding in this 
world’s wealth, soon become desirous of retracing the steps of their an¬ 
cestral march to the old home on the rugged shores of New England 
(43) 
