X              THE ICONOGRAPHY OF MANHATTAN ISLAND

To have read, or even to have examined cursorily, this great mass of
material would have been impossible; notwithstanding the encourage¬
ment offered by the conspicuous example of G. M. Asher, who tells us
that, in the preparation of his Essay on the Dutch Books and Pamphlets
relating to New-Netherland, in one single summer he bestowed "at least a
searching glance" on seven thousand pamphlets in the Royal Library at
The Hague, seven thousand in the Thysiana Library at Leyden, and
eight thousand at Amsterdam, besides consulting many manuscript and
printed authorities, and examining critically many hundred maps. Nat¬
urally, the greater part of these titles in the Public Library could be put
aside at once as relating to subdivisions of the subject foreign to our par¬
ticular field of investigation, or as being of too specialised a character to
be immediately useful.

In addition to a careful examination of such well-known sources as
Records of New Amsterdam^ Documentary History of New Torky New Tork
Colonial Documents, Ecclesiastical Records, Calendars of Historical Manu¬
scripts (Dutch and English), fournals of the Assembly, Laws of New Tork,
and Minutes of the Common Council, and of such authorities as Brodhead,
O'Callaghan, Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Van Rensselaer, and Riker, every promis¬
ing title was investigated, and several hundred works, both printed and
manuscript, were read or carefully scrutinised. The most important of
these, as well as a number of newly discovered sources, will be found
described in the Bibliography and in the Cartography. These researches,
beginning in the New York Public Library, were eventually extended to
cover the principal libraries and collections of America, and included the
New York Historical Society, the various city departments, the State
Library at Albany, the office of the Secretary of State, the Library of
Congress, the American Antiquarian Society, the Boston Public Library,
the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Massachusetts Archives, the
Connecticut Historical Society, the Rhode Island Historical Society, the
John Carter Brown Library, the New Jersey Historical Society, the New¬
berry Library, of Chicago, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and
the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Investigations were also undertaken abroad, personally, as well as
through agents and by correspondence, more especially for the Cartog¬
raphy, in connection with which government archives and the principal
libraries and private collections of Europe were investigated; and even in
South   America,  where   the  Surinam records, at Paramaribo  in Dutch