studies and writings, one finds them reaching out into
almost every direction of human thought; and this book, from which our
backward course is to be taken, is but a page from the great body of his
work. It is especially as a student of philosophy, science, and history
that Mr. Fiske is known to the world; and at the present it is
particularly as an historian of America that his name is spoken. In no
other way more satisfactorily than in tracing the growth of his own
nation has he found it possible to study the laws of progress of the
human race, and from the first, through all the time of his most active
philosophical and scientific work, this study of human progress has been
the true interest of his life. With his historical works, then, let us
begin.

In 1879 he delivered a course of six lectures on American history, at
the Old South Meeting House in Boston. In previous years he had written
occasional essays on historical subjects in general, but the impulse
towards American history in particular was given by the preparation for
these lectures, which were concerned especially with the colonial
period. Of his own treatment of an historical subject he is quoted as
saying: "I look it up or investigate it, and then write an essay or a
lecture on the subject. That serves as a preliminary statement, either
of a large subject or of special points. It is a help to me to make a
statement of the kind--I mean in the lecture or essay form. In fact it
always assists me to try to state the case. I never publish anything
after this first statement, but generally keep it with me for, it may
be, some years, and possibly return to it again several times." Thus it
may safely be assumed that these Old South Lectures and the many others
that have followed them have found or will find a permanent place in the
series of Mr. Fiske's historical volumes.

The succession of these books has not been in the order of the periods
of which they treat; but from the similarity of their method and the
fact that they cover a series of important periods in American history,
they go towards making a complete, consecutive history of the country.
The periods which are not yet covered Mr. Fiske proposes to deal with in
time. One who has talked with him on the subject of his works reports
the following statement as coming from Mr. Fiske's own lips: "I am now
at work on a general history of the United States. When John Richard
Green was planning his 'Short