Minor Notes.
_Boston and Bunker's Hill._--In the plan of Boston, among the maps of
the Useful Knowledge Society, is to be found, near Charleston, and on
Breed's Hill (the real site of the battle usually misnamed as of
Bunker's Hill), the following notice, "Defeat of the British, 1775." My
first idea was, that, _Liberal_ though the Society might be, it was
being rather too liberal to give away in this manner a victory which,
however bloody and fruitless, was indubitably ours: but, on second
thoughts, it seemed that the whole fault arose from copying too
implicitly an American map. Now I am well aware that a very large part
of the Americans, from continually vaunting (and with good reason) the
valour they displayed, and the honour they acquired, on that occasion,
have gradually worked themselves into the belief that they were the
victors, even though their own historians tell a different tale; and
they have even placed inscriptions on the monuments standing on the site
of the intrenchments from which they were forced by the British; which
inscriptions also assert a similar claim. This would be of no great
consequence had it been confined to themselves; but its being
transferred to an English publication not only tends to mislead many
persons on this side, but enables the Americans to refer with confidence
to it, as an admission of _their_ victory on the part of the British;
and no one who remembers the use they made, on the Oregon Question, of a
similarly occasioned error in one of the Society's globes, can doubt
that our Transatlantic friends would make the most of this trifling
affair in confirmation of their claims to the victory.