390 Reviezvs of Books Methods of Protecting the Provincial Currency. Mr. C. F. Adams has a paper on the Detention of the Laird Rams, exploding, with the aid of his father's papers and the Life of John M. Forbes, the legendary elements in the account of the matter presented by the late Mr. L. E. Chittenden in his Recollections of President Lincoln and his Administration. It is worth while remarking that this, and some remarks by the same writer on the battle of New Orleans, are practically the only papers in the volume, save obituary notices, that deal with any matters subsequent to 1775. Mr. Robert N. Toppan communicates to the Proceedings the full text of the Council records of Massachusetts under the administration of Presi- dent Joseph Dudley, derived from a transcript in the Massachusetts ar- chives and ultimately from the Public Record Office in London. These records, sixty pages in extent, supplement the Andros records which Mr. Toppan has already printed in the Proceedings of the American Anti- quarian Society. Vol. IIL of the Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, a substantial volume of 577 pages, embraces the proceedings of the society from January 1895 to April 1897 inclusive. There is nmch valuable matter in the book, along with some conventional antiquarianism. Mr. Andrew McFarland Davis follows up a definite and important line of re- search in a paper on Provincial Banks, Land and Silver, and presents an- other on the case of Frost vs. Leighton, previously discussed in this Re- view (IL 229). To the former of these subjects Mr. Davis recurs in the portion of Vol. V. which has been issued, in a paper called a Connecti- cut Land Bank, relating to the New London Society United for Trade and Commerce, chartered by the Connecticut Assembly in 1732. This, like the Massachusetts Land Banks of 1686 and 1714, he finds to have been due to the influence of the pamphlet, A Model for Erecting a Bank of Credit, London, 1684 and 1688. Mr. John Noble, clerk of the Su- preme Judicial Court, of whose arrangement of the very extensive files of that court we have already spoken, contributes papers on the Trial and Punishment of Crime in the Massachusetts of the seventeenth century, on the libel suit of Knowles vs. Douglass, 1748, 1749, and other matters from his Suffolk files. Mr. A. P. C. Griffin's bibliography of the his- torical publications of the New England states also deserves notice. Pro- fessor George L. Goodale of Harvard L^niversity, the eminent botanist, has an interesting essay on New England plants seen by the earliest colon- ists ; Mr. Henry D. Sedgwick, one on Robert Sedgwick. Many interest- ing letters or documents are produced and commented on, especially a letter of President Dunster to a committee of the General Court in 1653, of real importance to the history of Harvard College. The commem- oration of deceased members occupies, in the sum, 126 pages ; the index, marked by extraordinary elaboration, eighty-seven. Vol. II. is to con- tain the commissions and instructions of the royal governors of Massa- chusetts, their commissions as vice-admirals, and the commission of Ed- mund Gibson, Bishop of London, a document recently discovered, giv-
