Excerpt from Early New England Towns: A Comparative Study of Their Development The purpose of this work is to give in some detail an account of the institutional life of a Massachusetts town of the seventeenth century by means of a comparison of the institutions of five of the earliest of these towns, - Sa1em, Dorchester, Watertown, Roxbury and Cambridge. To accomplish this, it was found necessary to omit many of the more picturesque features connected With the settlement and early years of these towns and to confine this investiga tion-to the institutions and to their development during the century. This was the more easily done since the former phase of town history has been so well treated already that it seems impossible to improve upon the accounts we now have. 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.