geographical portion (vol. iii. of the original ed.), which Farmer never added to the publication.[357] Belknap says that he had been educated under the influence of Thomas Prince, and that he had used Prince’s library before it had been despoiled during the Revolution. Of Hutchinson—and Belknap was in early manhood before Hutchinson left New England—he says that while that historian writes many things regarding New Hampshire which Neal and Douglass have omitted, he himself omits others, which he did not think it proper to relate. He refers to Mr. Fitch, of Portsmouth, as having begun to collect notes on New Hampshire history as early as 1728, and says that he had found in Fitch’s papers some things not elsewhere obtainable. He also animadverts on errors into which Chalmers had fallen in his _Political Annals of the American Colonies_. [Illustration] EDITORIAL NOTES. =A.= THE DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND.—After the lapsing of the New England Confederacy consequent upon the charter of William and Mary, the governments which made up that group of colonies had no collective archives. It is only as we search the archives of the English Public Record Office, and those of Paris and Canada, including Nova Scotia, that we find those governments treated collectively. The _Reports_ of the English Historical Manuscripts Commission have of late years not only thrown additional light on our colonial history, as papers touching it preserved in the muniment rooms of leading families have been calendared, but the commission’s labors have also been the incentive by which the public depositary of records has been enriched by the transfer of many papers, which the commission has examined. Nine of their voluminous reports (up to 1885) have been printed, and by their indexes clues have been provided to the documents about New England history. The _Shelburne Papers_, belonging to the Marquis of Lansdowne, which make a large part of the _Fifth Report_, while of most interest in connection with the American Revolution, reveal not a little concerning the colonial history of the earlier part of the seventeenth century. The volumes enumerated in this _Report_, which are marked xlv. (1705-1724) and xlvi. (1686-1766), are of particular interest, referring entirely to the American colonies. We find here various papers of the Board of Trade and Plantations (or copies of them), embracing the replies from the provincial governors to their inquiries. In the volume numbered lxi., there are sundry reports of the attorney and solicitor-general, to whom had been referred the appeals of Massachusetts in 1699, and of Connecticut in 1701; his report of 1705 respecting Jesuits and papists in the plantations; that of 1707 on the acts of Massachusetts fining those trading with the French; that of 1710 on the reservation of trees in Massachusetts for masts of the royal navy; that of 1716 on the claim of the governor of Massachusetts