During the rest of the century the inhabitants of this Indian village on the ground where Buffalo was to stand, consisted of redskins and semi-redskins, a few Indian traders who doled out the firewater, and a settler or two. The present city of Buffalo, according to the encyclopaedia (and for once that mass of condensed wisdom is correct about the date of settlement of a Western city), was founded in 1801, by the Holland Land Company, which opened a land office here in January of that year. The notice of this event may be found in the region of page 146, in vol. ii, of Ketchum's book,--the uniform lack of concise statement, the huge amount of irrevelant matter, and the absence of lucid summaries and intelligent comment, making more exact reference impossible. The rest of this "comprehensive history" is occupied with the course of events down to December 30, 1813, when the British burnt the town, leaving but two houses standing--a dwelling-house and a blacksmith's shop. Here, having brought his Phoenix to ashes, our comprehensive historian brings his narrative to an abrupt end. This is at page 304. Then follows the "appendix," an invariable feature of city histories, which makes of every one of them a huge anti-climax. In this instance, one hundred and thirty-nine pages of appendix contain, according to the author, "for the purpose of preservation, a mass of papers not absolutely necessary to the elucidation of the history contained in the body of the work. Most of them consist of original papers and letters never before published, and which are now, for the first time, placed in an accessible and permanent form." To compare small things with great, these documents are made just about as "accessible" as are the State papers to which Carlyle devotes so much paper and bile in his book on Oliver Cromwell. In short, this book contains much valuable information, which is very hard to extract, and when extracted is not germane to the history of the city of Buffalo.