Excerpt from History of the County of Middlesex, Canada, From the Earliest Time to the Present: Containing an Authentic Account of Many Important Matters Relating to the Settlement, Progress and General History of the County, and Including a Department Devoted to the Preservation of Personal and Private Records, Etc
After over ten months of labor, this volume is respectfully tendered to our patrons. The design of the work was more to gather and pre serve in attractive form, while fresh with the evidences of truth, the enormous fund of perishing occurrence, than to abstract from insuffi cient data remote, doubtful or incorrect philosophical conclusions. The true perspective of the landscape of life can only be seen from the distance that lends enchantment to the view. So short has been the period since the settlement of the County of Middlesex, and so numer ous and heterogeneous the number of important events crowded into the toiling years, that no general attempt was made to prepare a critical or philosophical history. It is asserted that no person is competent to write a philosophical history of his own time; that, owing to imperfect and conflicting circumstantial evidence that yet conceals, instead of reveals, the truth, he cannot take that correct, unprejudiced, logical, luminous and comprehensive view of passing events that will enable him to draw accurate and enduring con elusions. The duty, then, of an historian of his own time is to collect, classify and preserve the material for the Macaulay of the future. The present historian deals in fact; the future historian, in conclusion; the work of the former is statistical; of the latter, philosophical.
This volume has been prepared under depressing obstacles, among which a lack of paying patronage was chief. In Spite of this, the Publishers have more than complied with their promises in the enor mous amount of fact crowded into the solid pages, and in nearly two hundred pages more of matter than were promised. In addition to this, a competent resident of the county was specially employed to read the proofs of the book, that the number of mistakes might be limited to the fewest. Much of the volume, in all departments, was compiled by local writers, to whom credit is properly given.
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.
