The history of liquor, from the time when Noah “planted a vineyard and drank of the wine” to the controversy over the eighteenth amendment to our Constitution, has been presented to the Society by the heirs of George C. Dempsey. Everything pertaining to the subject is liberally represented: receipts for wassail bowl (to be served with three pieces of toasted bread floating in it), milk posset (the receipt furnished by Sir Walter Raleigh), and 'rack punch (the beverage on which the Collector of Boggley Wallah disgraced himself at “Vanity Fair”); legislation, from the excise laws under the Stuarts to the licensing of American saloons; what the complete brewer should know; adulteration of liquor; temperance; prohibition; and the praise of wine.

Vocational guidance, as an effective development, has come only since the beginning of the century. But as long ago as 1795 Henry MacKenzie protested against wasting the years of youth at school “improving talents without having ever discovered them.”

Again in 1836, the idea appears in a book entitled “The Panorama of Trades and Professions,” a copy of which has come to the Society, written by Edward Hazen of Philadelphia. The book was “intended for the use of Schools and Families, as well as for miscellaneous readers.” In the preface, Mr. Hazen deplores the fact that “many individuals mistake their appropriate calling, and engage in employments for which they have neither mental nor physical adaptation,…and hence arise, in great measure, the ill success and discontent which so frequently attend the pursuits of men.”

“A true picture” of frontier life in Illinois is preserved in the reminiscences of a Yorkshire woman who, with her husband and five young children, immigrated in 1831. From the time she left England to the time she returned for a visit, mistress of a large and thriving farm, she maintained her indomitable courage, and the critical aloofness of the foreigner.

Her first night in Illinois was spent in a log cabin, where the “little lady, exceedingly fond of smoking, as Americans generally are, particularly the females,” expected to be paid for her hospitality, even though the family used its own provisions. The Yorkshireman, on whose recommendation they had come, appeared shortly, “verily, as ragged as a sheep,” and they moved their quarters to his house, which “was more like the cell of a hermit who aims at super-excellence by enduring privations than the cottage of an industrious peasant.”

Mr. Joseph P. Day of New York has again added to the collection of the Society, this time with an interesting assortment of three English books from the eighteenth century, and a fourth relating to the canal-building fever with which American cities were taken early in the nineteenth. The first item consists of two volumes of quotations on the London Stock Exchange, in 1725 and 1737. The earlier one is published by “John Castaing, Broker, at his Office at the Stationers, next the General-Post-Office in Lombard-Street”; the second by his widowed sister and another broker, Richard Shergold.