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is intended to supply a want that has long been felt by the nations of the New World, and more particularly by the people of the United States. Every scholar and every reader has recognized the benefit of the great French Dictionaries of Universal Biography, and the utility of the more recent National Biography of Great Britain, now in course of publication. Each nation should, if possible, have its own cyclopædia of biography. The Belgian, British, and German Dictionaries at present in progress are instances of such work in the Old World. It is proposed to provide a Cyclopædia of Biography for the New World worthy to rank with them.

The Cyclopædia will include the names of above twenty thousand prominent native and adopted citizens of the United States, including living persons, from the earliest settlement of the country; also the names of several thousand eminent citizens of Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Chili, Peru, and all the other countries of North and South America. The great aim has been to embrace all noteworthy persons of the New World, and to give biographies that shall embody with sufficient fulness the latest result of historical research, rendering it a reference-book of the highest order. The work will also contain the names of nearly one thousand men of foreign birth who, like Bishop Berkeley, Braddock, Burgoyne, Cabot, Columbus, Cornwallis, Lafayette, Montcalm, and Whitefield, are closely identified with American history.

The editors have endeavored, in all instances, to obtain the co-operation of the most competent students of special periods or departments of history, and they have had the assistance of scholarly and experienced associates, together with a well-equipped staff of writers. Many articles of importance have been contributed by some of the most brilliant names in American literature as well as by many of our most illustrious statesmen, soldiers, and jurists. Much valuable material has been obtained from original sources; and in the case of recent lives and those "men of light and leading" who are still with us, important aid has been afforded by the friends and relatives of the subjects.

It has been the aim of the editors to render the Cyclopædia educational as well as entertaining and instructive, by making those articles referring to important men and measures full and exhaustive; thus, in the articles on the