Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/437

 Minor Notices 427 Baptist Councils in America. A Historical Study of their Origin and the Principles of their Development. By William Henry Allison, B.D. (Chicago, Press of George C. Hazlitt and Company, 1906, pp. 115.) In this work the author traces the principle of fellowship among Baptist churches in England and America from its beginning in the seventeenth century to the formation, in 1896, of the Permanent Council of Baptist Churches of the City of New York. A council in the Baptist polity is technically an organized body convened at the call of a local church and composed of representatives of the churches to which the call is issued, for the purpose of advising the convening church in regard to such matters as are stated in the call. The appearance of these councils in the Baptist denomination in the eighteenth century is presented in this study as a reflection of the democratic ideas of that time ; and the author discusses closely the status of these councils then and since and their functions, still purely advisory, in such matters as the organization and dissolution of churches, the ordination and deposition of ministers, and the preservation of inter-congregational harmony. The work is fur- nished with a bibliography of its subject; it is based on a careful investi- gation of historical collections chiefly in New England. A Tour of Four Great Rivers: the Hudson, Mohazuk, Susquehanna and Delaware, in i'/6g; being the Journal of Richard Smith of Burling- ton, New Jersey. Edited with a Short History of the Pioneer Settle- ments, by Francis W. Halsey. (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906, pp. Ixxiii, 102.) On the third of May, 1769, less than six months after the establishment of the Fort Stanwix Property Line, Richard Smith, a younger brother of the historian of New Jersey, left Burling- ton to superintend, for himself and associates, the survey of a tract of 69,000 acres lying in the southern part of what is now Otsego County, New York. His route lay across New Jersey and up the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers as far as Scramlin's ( PCanajoharie). Proceeding thence to the Susquehanna via Cherry Valley and Otsego Lake, he left that river at Oghwaga, gained the Delaware at Cookoose (Deposit), and followed it to Burlington. The journey, which he estimated at 676 miles in all, was completed the tenth of June. From a copy of the care- ful journal which Smith kept throughout his trip, Mr. Francis W. Halsey printed some extracts in his Old Neiv York Frontier (1901), and now, having compared it with the original manuscript, he has edited the entire diary, in a generously " limited " edition of 780 copies, as A Tour of Four Great Rivers. Richard Smith was an agreeable person as well as a useful diarist. He noted carefully the character of the soil and the timber, the size of the sawmills, the extension of settlement, the sources of supply of provisions, the prices of land and of goods, the opportunities for roads, and hundreds of other prosaic details which might throw light upon the actual and prospective value of his lands. And he gave a des- cription no less exact of " the only Rattle Snake [he] ever saw alive ", and recorded his pleasure at discovering the nests of the redbird, and of AM. HIST. KEV., VOL. XH. — 28.