Excerpt from Old Plate: Its Makers and Marks Prof. T. S. Woolsey, of Yale University, writing in Harper's Magazine (vol. Urges the importance of investigating more fully the subject of American silversmithing: English silversmiths emigrated to this country, and did as good work here as at home. As we learn the names and marks of these men, and can thus identify their work, why is it not, for us at least, as valuable and interesting as any other? What we need is a careful list of such workmen, with their dates and the marks they struck. But it needs a vast amount of work. The town records should be searched on the one hand, and thousands of examples of American-made plate should be cata logued and collated on the other, as Rosenberg has done for Germany. When we are able to identify the makers' marks on nine-tenths of the American-made plate treasured by our Colonial families, thus learning where and between what dates it must have been made, it should have in our eyes a value such as no foreign plate of the same age can boast. 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.