In some dark recess of the Treasury Office Mr. Ridgely struck upon a mine of wealth, in a mouldy wooden box, which was found to contain many missing Journals of the Provincial Council, some of which bore date as far back as 1666.  It was a sad disappointment to him, when his eye was greeted with the sight of these folios, to see them crumble, like the famed Dead-Sea Apples, into powder, upon every attempt, to handle them.  The form of the books was preserved and the character of the writing distinctly legible, but, from the effect of moisture, the paper had lost its cohesion, and fell to pieces at every effort to turn a leaf.  I was myself a witness to this tantalizing deception, and, with the Librarian, read enough to show the date and character of the perishing record.

Through this accident, the Council Journals of a most interesting period, embracing several years between 1666 and 1692, were irretrievably lost.  Others sustained less damage, and were partially preserved.  Some few survived in good condition.

Our Maryland historians have had frequent occasion to complain of the deficiency of material for the illustration of several epochs in the Provincial existence, owing to the loss of official records.  No research has supplied the means of describing the public events of these intervals, beyond some few inferences, which are only sufficient to show that these silent periods were marked by incidents of important interest.  The most striking of these privations occurs towards the end of the seventeenth century,—­precisely that period to which the crumbling folios had reference.

This loss of the records has been ascribed to their frequent removals during periods of trouble, and to the havoc made in the rage of parties.  The Province, like the great world from which it was so far remote, was distracted with what are sometimes called religious quarrels, but what I prefer to describe as exceedingly irreligious quarrels, carried on by men professing to be Christians, and generated in the heat of disputes concerning the word of the great Teacher of “peace on earth.”  Out of these grew any quantity of rebellion and war, tinctured with their usual flavor of persecution.  For at this era the wars of Christendom were chiefly waged in support of dogmas and creeds, and took a savage hue from the fury of religious bigotry.  The wars of Europe since that period have arisen upon commercial and political questions, and religion has been freed from the dishonor of promoting these bloody strifes so incompatible with its high office.  In these quarrels of the fathers of Maryland, the archives of government were seized more than once, and, perhaps, destroyed.  On one occasion they were burnt.  And so, amongst all these disorders, it has fallen out that the full development of the State history has been rendered impossible.