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Kimball: Correspondence of JVilliain Pitt 663 Nowhere, except perhaps in the author's Waterivays of IVestzvard Ex- pansion in the Historic Highways series, will one find so full and satisfactory treatment of the conditions and means of navigation on the Ohio from the eighteenth century to the present, covering the age of the canoe, of the flatboat, of the steamboat, and of the steel barge, and not neglecting the activities of the government since 1825 for the improvement of the river's channel. Particularly interesting is the account of the brig and schooner building in the period 1800-1809, when Ohio valley promoters were for the time bent upon the romantic project of establishing direct commercial intercourse with the West Indies and Europe. The book is unfortunately subject to the limitations and defects of a hasty and somewhat scrappy narrative. It abounds in lengthy quotations, of which those coming from early writers and first-hand observers are clearly apropos, while the utility of those from Roose- velt, Venable, and other recent authors is at least open to question. There is a tendency at times to state things rather more broadly than the authenticated facts warrant. For example, is it not a little too much to say that " There is no question but that the brave La Salle discovered La Belle Riviere of New France (the Allegheny and Ohio) about 1670" (p. 18)? The probability of the discovery is strong, but after all it is only a probability. And does not the statement that " Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century there was con- tinual fighting between the French on the St. Lawrence and the colonists in New England" (p. 19) convey an erroneous impression? The work is richly illustrated and for the most part with very de- sirable effect. But one cannot refrain from expressing regret that the process of " padding " which, we may presume, is more or less inevitable in a book of the kind, should have been carried so far as to obtrude cuts of the Carnegie Institute and the Phipps Conservatory into a really solid description of Pittsburgh a hundred years ago, and of the Louisville waterworks into a chapter on " Where Yankee and Vir- ginian Met." Frederic Austin Ogg. Correspondence of IViUiam Pitt zdien Secretary of State zvith Colon- ial Governors and Military and Naval Coiiiinanders in Amer- ica. Edited under the auspices of The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America by Gertrude Selwyn Kimball. (New York: The Macmillan Company ; London: Macmillan and Company, Ltd. 1906. Two vols., pp. Ixix, 445; xxiii, 502.) It is perhaps singular that a century and a half should have elapsed before the student had access, in convenient form, to the correspond- ence of the " Great Commoner ", the man who at a critical moment became the head and heart of England in arms. And it is almost a matter of reproach to the sterner sex that the editing of documents