Abstraction, loss, and careless custody of registers is constantly going on. Mr. Bruce mentions, that in 1845 he made some copious extracts from the dilapidated books at Andover, “but on recently visiting that place for the purpose of a supplementary search,” he says, “I found that these books were no longer in existence, and that those which remained were kept in the rectory-house, in a damp place under the staircase, and in a shameful state of dilapidation.” The second case occurred at Kirkby Malzeard, near Ripon, where the earliest register mentioned in the parliamentary return was reported to be lost. “Having occasion to believe that the statement was not correct,” Mr. Bruce states, “I persevered in my inquiries, and at length fortunately discovered the book, in a tattered state, behind some old drawers in the curate’s back kitchen. Again, at Farlington, near Sheriff Hutton, the earliest registers were believed and represented to be lost, until I found their scattered leaves at the bottom of an old parish chest which I observed in the church.” Even as we write, an enquiry appears in the newspapers from the parish officers of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, addressed to “collectors” and others, after their own Registers; two among the most historically important and interesting years of the seventeenth century are nowhere to be found. The avidity and dishonesty of many of these “collectors,” or archæological cockchafers, are shocking to think of. They seem to have passed for their own behoof a universal statute of limitations; and when a book, an autograph, or a record is a certain number of years old, they think it is no felony to steal it. Recently we were interested in searching the Register for the birth of Joseph Addison; and at the altar of the pretty little church of Milston, in Wilts, we were told that a deceased rector had cut out the leaf which contained it, to satisfy the earnest longings of a particular friend, “a collector”—a poet, too, who ought to have been ashamed to instigate the larceny. It is hoped that his executors—his name has been inserted in a burial register since—will think fit to restore it to its proper place at their early convenience. Mr. Bruce recommends that the whole of the Registers now deposited in parish churches, in rectors’ coal-cellars, churchwardens’ outhouses, curates’ back-kitchens, and goose-eating parish clerks’ cottages, should be collected into one central fire-proof building in London.