In the streaked shade of a scrub mesquite a vaquero pours boiling water into a can holding two spoonfuls of concentrated coffee, adds cream from a tin, spoons in sugar to suit, and miles away from the nearest house enjoys a cup of coffee. Chances are good that the coffee came in a jar marked “Borden's” and that the cream, condensed but fresh and pure though hours away from a refrigerator or a cool well, came in a can bearing a similar label; for radiating from its New York hub The Borden Company has pushed into American homes and American life until its products are known wherever food products are bought, sold, and used.

A book has recently been published in the field of medieval business which should be called to the attention of readers of the Bulletin. It is The Medici Bank: Its Organization, Management, Operations, and Decline, by Raymond de Roover. This hundred-page volume in large part appeared earlier in the form of articles in a learned journal, but it is now available to a wider circle of readers in attractive form and beautifully illustrated. This notice is especially addressed to businessmen, who presumably did not see the articles as they appeared in the Journal of Economic History.

At the close of the Napoleonic era, the banking business of France except in one respect had not advanced much over what it had been in 1789. At that time it had been dominated by Protestant Swiss, the best known of whom was Necker. Some of them like the Mallets, Delesserts, and Thélussons, descended from French Huguenots who had fled to Geneva and other places and in a later generation returned to France as Swiss. The business of these bankers consisted in lending their own funds and those entrusted to their care to worthy applicants for loans, probably merchants as well as noblemen. They administered fortunes for their owners, which is especially true of the court bankers who were charged with the financial affairs of the king and his family. In addition, like all eighteenth-century bankers they had a flourishing business in bills of exchange, including the accepting of drafts of bankers and merchants in other cities and countries. Necker is said to have organized these bankers and their foreign correspondents so as to provide by a system of short-term drafts the funds for French participation in our Revolutionary War.