An _Abridgment of the Records of Indian Affairs, transacted in the Colony of New York from 1678 to 1751_, with a preface by the compiler, is the work of Peter Wraxall, secretary for Indian affairs. It is a manuscript of 224 pages, dated at New York, May 10, 1754.[498] It is to be regretted that Wraxall’s complete record of these transactions has not been preserved, as the few extracts of them handed down to us in the _Council Minutes_ and in the _Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York_ give us a great deal of curious and interesting information.[499] The religious life in the colony of New York during the early part of the eighteenth century, as seen from the Episcopal point of view, is well depicted in a manuscript volume (107 pp. folio), _Extracts from Correspondence of the Venerable Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts with the Missionaries T. Payer, S. Seabury, and others, from 1704 to 1709_.[500] The history of trade and business is likewise illustrated in the _Commercial Letters_ of the firm P. & R. Livingston, New York and Albany, from 1733 to 1738, and of Boston and Philadelphia merchants during the same period, giving us a picture of mercantile transactions at that time which a number of account-books of N. De Peyster, treasurer of the colony and merchant in the city of New York, and of the firm of Beverley Robinson & Morrison Malcom, in Fredericksburg, now Patterson, Putnam County, N. Y., help to fill out.[501] II. CARTOGRAPHY AND BOUNDARIES OF THE MIDDLE COLONIES. (_By Mr. Fernow and the Editor._)—The following enumeration of maps includes, among others, those of a general character, as covering the several middle colonies jointly, and they run parallel in good part with the sequence named in an earlier section[502] on the “Cartography of Louisiana and the Mississippi Basin under the French Domination,” so that many of the maps mentioned there may be passed over or merely referred to here.[503] There was little definite knowledge of American geography manifested by the popular gazetteers of the early part of the last century,[504] to say nothing of the strange misconceptions of some of the map-makers of the same period.[505]