Two years ago the Baker Library made its first major excursion into the field of early Italian business source material when Mr. H. Gordon Selfridge deposited with it a number of account books belonging to a branch of the Medici family. This summer the Society acquired, through the generosity of Mr. Edward J. Frost, of Boston, some account books and other business records of the great Barberini and Sciarra-Colonna families of Rome. This collection of eighty-seven vellum-bound volumes, covering the activities one of Italy's most powerful families from 1618 to 1816, takes up the story of Italian banking almost where the earlier books left it.

The Society has just been presented with the business records of Bigelow, Kennard and Company, of Boston, one of the oldest jewelry firms in this country. The papers fill over sixty packing cases. A preliminary inspection of them has revealed about a dozen letters from an army officer, stationed in New Mexico in the early 1850's, shortly after it came into the possession of the United States, which give a most interesting glimpse at the isolated and sometimes adventurous life of an army post in the Apache country, and at the ways in which business reached the frontiers of the great West.

Perhaps the fullest collection of material on the Suez Canal in the United States has been given to the Business School Library and the Society by the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, through the agency of Mr. George Edgar Bonnet, Directeur General Adjoint of the Company. The bulk of the collection consists of annual reports of the Company, from 1860 to 1870, and from 1872 to 1928; the reports of the Engineer in Chief to the Commission Consultative Internationale des Travaux; and the documentary record of the canal, with M. de Lesseps' personal comments, in the Lettres, Journal et Documents, covering the period between 1854 and 1869, the dates of the first step toward the enterprise and the opening of the canal, and the reports of the International Commission, the Dutch Commission, and the English Meetings, and other papers published under the title Percement de L'Isthme de Suez.

In An earlier issue of the Bulletin there was a description of an incunabulum printed at Venice in 1494, the first historical treatise on accountancy. Two months ago the Society acquired a volume which goes back even further into the cradle days of printing. It is a very early book on commerce. It was presented to the Society by Mr. Joseph P. Day in coöperation with officers of the Society.

A pamphlet in which is contained one of the schemes of land speculation which wrecked the fortune and credit of Robert Morris, the financier of the American Revolution, has lately come to the Society as the gift of Charles E. Tuttle of Rutland, Vt. The Plan of Association of the North American Land Company represents an earlier chapter in the same story in which some letters, which have been in the possession of the Society for two years, belong to the last.

An officer of the Society has presented the organization with an unusual gift, a white oak bas-relief of the famous clipper ship Flying Cloud.

Although Dr. Einstein has shaken our faith in the very existence of an absolute standard of measure or weight, the expression of length, area, volume and weight by comparison with standards which to our senses appear to be stable will continue to be a necessity of human society, even of the very existence of mankind. As John Quincy Adams stated it:

“Weights and measures may be ranked among the necessaries of life to every individual…. They enter the economical arrangements and daily concerns of every family. They are necessary to every occupation of human industry; to the distribution and security of every species of property; every transaction of trade and commerce; to the labors of the husbandman; to the ingenuity of the artificer; to the studies of the philosopher; to the researches of the antiquarian; to the navigation of the mariner and the marches of the soldier, to all the exchanges of peace and all the operations of war.”

A pamphlet published by Warren Brothers Company which tells the story of the past eighty years' development of a very old industry, has been presented to the Society by Mr. George C. Warren. Although the use of asphalt for paving purposes is generally thought of as a nineteenth-century invention, it is, as a matter of fact, older than Nebuchadnezzar. An inscription on a brick found on “Procession Street,” which led from the palace to the North wall, states that Nebuchadnezzar's father, Nabopolassar, King of Babylon, “had made a road glistening with asphalt and burnt bricks,” and that he, “Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, he who made Esaglia and Ezida glorious, placed above the bitumen and burnt bricks, a mighty superstructure of shining dust, made them strong within with bitumen and burnt bricks as a high-lying road.”

When this subject was presented to me it appeared quite clearly as a challenge. When I first became interested in the history of business, it was as a study somewhat divorced from the ordinary routine of affairs. I was a student of economic history who had become convinced that the fundamental approach to this subject was along the line of private enterprise. Now I am asked to point out what value there may be in business history to the business man. At the very beginning of this discussion I ought to make a distinction between two types of business history; one, the history of individual business firms; the other, business history in general.

One of the primary purposes of the founders of The Business Historical Society was to effect the preservation of valuable historical documents and records which, for one reason or another, are so often destroyed by their owners. Not always, however, is the Society able to do so.

An amusing and at the same time heartbreaking instance came to its attention recently where an old Maine farmhouse had been subjected to a housecleaning, and where the owners reported they had found many letters signed by Abraham Lincoln. Supposing that the signatures might be of value, they clipped out all the signatures and burned the letters.

We are indebted to Mr. E. A. S. Clarke, Secretary of the American Iron and Steel Institute, for calling our attention to an article in the 1901 Transactions of the British Institute which places the oldest joint-stock enterprise in the world at Domnarfvet, Sweden. It is the Stora Kopparbergs (Great Copper Mountain) Mining Company, deriving its name from the celebrated copper mine at Falun, where one of its plants is located.

This summer when I was in Rome, I went to the Vatican, at Mr. Ayres' suggestion, to see what I could discover as to the history of the Barberini-Sciarra di Colonna family whose account books have just been presented to The Business Historical Society. I met all sorts of obstacles.

The man who regards the “elder times” as the good old days is a feature of all ages. In the sixteenth century the coach was denounced as a dangerous innovation, and in the seventeenth, conservatives lamented the crowding of the roads with the new vehicles, and found in them a menace to the public integrity. In a book written in 1837, by William Bridges Adams on English Pleasure Carriages the history of the invention and progress of wheeled carriages and the stir caused by their introduction into the various countries is amusingly given, as a preface to a lengthy description of the construction of the various types of pleasure carriages then in use.

Advertising, like many other features of business, has come fully into its own in the twentieth century. Again like many other fields of business enterprise, it is as old as competitive industry. A sketch of its history up to 1874, is given by Henry Sampson in his History of Advertising.

The name “Russell and Company,” heading a package of business papers and correspondence, which lay for years a prey to white ants before they found their way to the Society, recalls perhaps the most romantic and one of the most remunerative of the trades carried on by American sailing vessels. Russell and Company was the best-known American house at Canton in the pre-treaty period, when a few foreign merchants carried on a business there which ran up into the millions, in teas, silks, furs, sandalwood, opium, and western manufactured goods. A consolidation of several of the principal American firms, the company was for years the principal representative of the American business in Canton. The papers were a gift from Mr. Robert Shewan, of Shewan Tomes and Company, of Hong Kong.