Excerpt from Forty Years of Pioneer Life: Memoir of John Mason Peck, D. D., Edited From His Journals and Correspondence No compiler of a biography could desire to be favored with more abundant and reliable materials. They consist of a very extensive correspondence from the year 1808 to that of Dr. Peck's death, covering full fifty years of his eventful life. Then in addition to these well-arranged letters, which a thousand hands have contributed, with the substance of his more important replies, there are his journals for almost this entire period, filling fifty-three volumes, some few of them small and portable for his convenience in traveling, but most of them large, either folios or quartos of some hundreds of pages each, full of all facts and incidents which his inquisitive and almost ubiquitous spirit of research brought under his observation. The superabundance of these materials has indeed proved the principal embarrassment in this compilation. They are ample, and by Dr. Peck himself were designed for a more full and extended memoir of his life and times than it seemed advisable to the publishers now to send forth. The embarrassment and perplexity of deciding what to reject entirely, and what to condense, and to what extent, has been the chief difficulty, and is the very point where most fault is likely to be found with this volume. Many readers of it will no doubt fail to find some of the things they had looked for with fondest expectation, and which, in their partial judgment, would have been more interesting than other things which arc here preserved. Let all such charitably remember how many there are of different tastes, judgments, and personal predilections, and at least pardon, if they do not fully approve, the earnest endeavor here made wisely to compromise conflicting claims. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.