Many learned, elaborate and interesting works have never been seen in America ; some are so scarce that they cannot be procured without the expense of transcribing; and papers of great moment have never been printed. " The regular minutes of the transactions of the Indian Commissioners for this Colony, from 1675 to 1751, as kept by a secretary employed for the purpose, were bound up in four large foliovolumes. This invaluable collection, and the subsequent Colonial records relative to Indian affairs, are not now to be found in this State; and they were probably conveyed away by Sir John Johnson, or his agents, at the commencement of the Revolution. The loss of these documents would produce a chasm in our history that could not be supplied and we ;

hope that they may still be retrieved. Our concerns and negotiations with the Indians, since our existence as a State, have not been preserved in regular and complete order. They are scattered among the bureaus of our chief magistrates or are buried in the voluminous files of the Legislature. " To obtain materials for the Dutch portion of our history, comprising an interesting period

of half a century, we must have recourse to the papers of the Dutch West India Company, and to the archives of the then government of that nation to the Dutch records of some of ;

our counties, and in the ofBce of the Secretary of State to the public offices in the neighboring ;

Colonies, with whose governments the Dutch had negotiations ; and to several books published and which are scarcely known to in the Dutch and Latin languages, relative to this country, us. The darkness which hangs over this branch may be perceived in the History of New- York, written by William Smith, a work which skims lightly over this interesting period, leaving it almost entirely unnoticed.