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1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 275 volumes in the Kecord Office and were compelled to rely upon the printed text. The authorities are to be warmly congratulated on the new policy of publication here begun, and it is to be hoped that it may be extended wherever practicable to other registers of historical interest preserved in the national archives. To many investigators it seems that registers are, as a rule, entirely unsuited to extraction and inclusion in the necessarily rigid chronological arrangement of a calendar of state papers. By the present volume they will undoubtedly be confirmed in that view. The labour that was entailed in the extraction and publication of the colonial entries from the Kegister of the Acts of the Privy Council was hardly repaid by the resulting volumes of the Acts of the Privy Council, Colonial, and would have been of far greater value had the entries been left in their setting and the register published as a whole. The working of a piece of administrative machinery can be understood only vaguely when we have but portions of its records before us, and especially so when they have been torn from their context. If we can be provided with the register of its work that was made up as the work went on for the guidance of those who were using the machine, we shall be placed in as favourable a position for understanding it as any outsider can be. And not merely is this the case, the import of every paper that was produced in the working of the machine can be better appreciated if we know as much of the circumstances of its production as is revealed by a register or journal. A truer view of the administration of the outer empire can be obtained from a careful perusal of the Board of Trade Journal in its entirety as published for a given year. The subsequent volumes of the Calendar of State Payers, Colonial, too, will necessarily be improved and made easier of consultation. In his short preface the deputy-keeper expresses the hope that the publication of the journals down to the dissolution of the board in 1782 may be accomplished in a reasonable time, while many years must necessarily elapse before the colonial calendar can be brought down to that date. Till such an end can be achieved, the present volume of the journal and its successors will provide a means of access to the yet uncalendared original papers that will be of great value to investigators. Every letter received by the commissioners was read at a meeting and noted in the journal with all its enclosures, its place of deposit being then indicated by a marginal note with a brief docket showing the subject of its contents. The places of deposit are to be found in the series of volumes of succeeding papers relating each to a different part of the empire (e. g. Jamaica, Leeward Islands, New York, New England, &c.) that from the date of their commencement have been preserved unbroken as the basis of arrangement of our colonial archives. If, therefore, an investigator at a distance desires to consult a particular paper or papers relating to the subject in which he is interested, it will be easy for him to search the published Journal to ascertain the date at which they were read to the board. He may then direct his copyist's attention to the matter he requires without being involved in the expense of a laborious search. He can be certain, too, that he has before him in the Journal an index of all the papers relating to his subject that reached the commissioners, T2