The Business Historical Society is happy to note the organization of the Business History Society of Indiana. The home of the Society will be at Indiana University; the Library of the University will be the official depository for the materials collected, and the departments of Economics and History stand pledged to aid the enterprise.

Some years ago the Minnesota Historical Society received from Miss Vera Cole a collection of volumes and papers which had been the property of her father, a Minneapolis business man.

Probably most Americans who read Dumas' immortal Three Musketeers and its sequels have no clear idea of the coins in question when the great novelist writes of pistoles and louis d'or. And though the louis d'or was coined for only about a century and a half, it has left, thanks to a fortunate combination of circumstances, a lasting mark in history.

Joseph Hertzog was born at a time when the spirit of romanticism was displacing the cold, calculating aura of the eighteenth century; when Schiller and Goethe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Poe and Whittier, impelled by their love for the homelier things of life, wrote eloquently to the heart of man; when the Ohio yielded place to the Mississippi as a western boundary; when the pioneers were pushing the frontiers farther and farther westward and giving our country that dauntless courage, that sturdy honesty, and that democratic spirit which we should like to consider synonymous with “Americanism” today. With his poetic soul, clear vision, and faith in his country, Hertzog contributed to the progress that marked his epoch and gave to posterity an example of sterling qualities that never wavered in the face of disappointment, ill treatment, and even failure to realize the ambitions he hoped to reach.

The establishment of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris in 1799, following a conception for a museum of science and industry outlined by Descartes a century and a half earlier, was the beginning of a type of institution which has great significance to business history. Many industrial museums have since been established. Some have grown to vast exhibitions of industrial machines and processes, such as the Science Museum in London, the Deutsches Museum in Munich, the Technical Museum in Vienna, and the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. In America and in Europe many smaller museums have also been established to illustrate some particular aspects of industrial development. Among the outstanding ones in America are the Edison Museum, established by Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan, the Industrial Museum of the American Steel and Wire Co. at Worcester, Massachusetts, and the John Woodman Higgins Armory, of the Worcester Pressed Steel Co.

With old age we associate feebleness, an antiquated point of view, and general decay. None of these is found in the department store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is the object of our interest.

Those of us today who associate the title of “notary public” only with the man or woman who affixes a seal to our income-tax declaration, after we have sworn to its accuracy and signed it, are surprised to learn what an important role the public notary played in the early days of business. For a view of that other notary let us turn back to Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Then practically every kind of business contract, except buying and selling for cash, was drawn up by a public notary in the presence of witnesses, thus becoming a matter of public record. Partnership agreements, investments in business by non-partners, loans of goods and money, credit sales, banking operations, bills of exchange, leases for shops and houses, contracts of labor and apprenticeship— all were recorded in the register of an official notary. Each city collected the cartularies of its notaries at their death and preserved them carefully.

How many of those who listen to Shylock's famous lament, “My daughter!—O my ducats!” realize that the ducat was for centuries the world's best-known gold coin? For ducats had been in wide circulation as many years before Shakespeare's time as the great dramatist antedates our present era.

Our colonial merchants faced the risk of great loss in shipping by sea. But against these losses they had for a time little recourse except insurance in London—where marine insurance was developing rapidly—and that insurance was slow to arrange and uncertain at best because of the uncertainties of communication.

The Minnesota Historical Society has a widely varied collection of business history material, ranging from records of the lumber industry to the papers of Franklin Steele, who developed the St. Anthony Falls water site and was probably the first millionaire in Minnesota.

There seems to be a strong interest at this time in the idea of national organization in the field of economic and industrial history.

As had been announced in The Bulletin, the growth of rigidity in business was the subject of the joint meeting and of the luncheon of the Business Historical Society and the American Economic Association held in Philadelphia on December 29, 1939.

Among the manuscript collections deposited in the Baker Library are the Land Department records of the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad, now part of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad.