Our first and greatest debt is to the heirs of the late Helen Tyler Brown, namely Allan D. Sutherland, M.D., and Mrs. Dorothy Sutherland Melville, and to the Director, Dr. Richard G. Wood, and Trustees of the Vermont Historical Society, for permitting us to borrow, study, reproduce, and edit for publication the precious and fragile MS of The Earliest Diary of John Adams.

The Honorable William R. Tyler, a descendant of Royall Tyler and currently United States Ambassador at The Hague, has taken a most helpful and continuous interest in this undertaking from a time, it may be said, before it started.

The editors of the Legal Papers of John Adams , Messrs. L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, have not only furnished the valuable commentary on John Adams’ first legal case which is signed with their names, but have helped us solve difficult textual problems and legal questions at many other points.

We are indebted to Dr. Jules D. Prown of Yale University for the privilege of using certain findings in his two-volume study of John Singleton Copley, to be published in 1966 by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; and to Mr. David P. Wheatland of Harvard University for information on early scientific instruments at Harvard.

Mr. John E. Alden, Mrs. Elizabeth E. Butterfield, Mr. Kimball C. Elkins, Mr. Van Courtlandt Elliott, Mrs. Jane N. Garrett, Mr. Richard M. Gummere, and Dr. Clifford K. Shipton have continued their assistance to the Adams Papers in their specialties and in their invariably generous way.

The editors’ sense of gratitude to the Director and staff of the Massachusetts Historical Society and to the entire organization of Harvard University Press grows keener as the Adams Papers enterprise grows older. They take especial pleasure, too, in publicly acknowledging for the first time the fidelity and competence of two relatively new members of the Adams Papers staff, Editorial Assistants Susan F. Riggs and Lynne G. Crane.