The same sad misfortune which has happened to so many ancient cities will happen again, and from the same sad cause, to nine-tenths of those which now flourish on the face of the globe.  With most of them the time for recording their history is gone by:  their origin, their foundation, together with the early stages of their settlement, are for ever buried in the rubbish of years; and the same would have been the case with this fair portion of the earth if I had not snatched it from obscurity in the very nick of time, at the moment that those matters herein recorded were about entering into the widespread insatiable maw of oblivion—­if I had not dragged them out, as it were, by the very locks, just as the monster’s adamantine fangs were closing upon them for ever!  And here have I, as before observed, carefully collected, collated, and arranged them, scrip and scrap, “punt en punt, gat en gat,” and commenced in this little work, a history to serve as a foundation on which other historians may hereafter raise a noble superstructure, swelling in process of time, until Knickerbocker’s New York may be equally voluminous with Gibbon’s Rome, or Hume and Smollett’s England!

And now indulge me for a moment:  while I lay down my pen, skip to some little eminence at the distance of two or three hundred years ahead; and, casting back a bird’s-eye glance over the waste of years that is to roll between, discover myself—­little I—­at this moment the progenitor, prototype, and precursor of them all, posted at the head of this host of literary worthies, with my book under my arm, and New York on my back, pressing forward, like a gallant commander, to honor and immortality.

Such are the vain-glorious misgivings that will now and then enter into the brain of the author—­that irradiate, as with celestial light, his solitary chamber, cheering his weary spirits, and animating him to persevere in his labors.  And I have freely given utterance to these rhapsodies whenever they have occurred; not, I trust, from an unusual spirit of egotism, but merely that the reader may for once have an idea how an author thinks and feels while he is writing—­a kind of knowledge very rare and curious, and much to be desired.

FOOTNOTES: 

    [1] Beloe’s Herodotus.

HISTORY OF NEW YORK.

BOOK I.

CONTAINING DIVERS INGENIOUS THEORIES AND PHILOSOPHIC SPECULATIONS, CONCERNING THE CREATION AND POPULATION OF THE WORLD, AS CONNECTED WITH THE HISTORY OF NEW YORK.

CHAPTER I.

According to the best authorities, the world in which we dwell is a huge, opaque, reflecting, inanimate mass, floating in the vast ethereal ocean of infinite space.  It has the form of an orange, being an oblate spheroid, curiously flattened at opposite parts, for the insertion of two imaginary poles, which are supposed to penetrate and unite at the center; thus forming an axis on which the mighty orange turns with a regular diurnal revolution.