Thirty miles west of Denver, in narrow, boulder-strewn Clear Creek Canyon, high on the eastern frontal range of the Colorado Rockies, the ghostlike remains of Central City stand amid the monuments of a golden past — mute, decaying mine shafts, bleak, windowless stamp mills, and abandoned gold lodes littered with the broken and rusty debris of many lost hopes and a few fulfilled dreams. Here in the “Golden Mile” between the silent works of Black Hawk and the rebuilt brick buildings of Central City a granite shaft marks the site where prospector John Gregory discovered gold dust in his pan one April day in 1859 and gave sustenance to the first fruitless “Pike's Peak Gold Rush” of the previous autumn.

Because of his antiquity the peddler occupies a distinguished position in the history of merchandising. Some historians have credited him with being the earliest business man or petty capitalist in western European economy, while others have seriously questioned his primacy in this respect; all agree, however, that he made his appearance very early in the history of merchandising. From his beginning he seems to have exercised most of the economic functions which have characterized him throughout his history. The transportation and retailing of goods to a scattered and rural market unable as yet to support the settled petty capitalist have generally been the function of the peddler. From the earliest times, too, he has traded his wares for the products of his customers, thus promoting commerce where money has been scarce and where people have lacked local agents to transport their surplus to outside markets. Always he has found the arrival of settled petty capitalists and the conditions which have given rise to them a competitive menace, and he has been able to survive only when he has modified his plan of operations so drastically as to destroy much of his original pattern of conduct.

Among the numerous explanations offered for the origin of the American dollar sign, no one seems to have raised the question of whether the dollar sign may have the same ancestry as the word “dollar.” There is no doubt about the etymology of “dollar.” It is derived from the German word Thaler, through the Dutch daalder. Furthermore, it is certain that Thaler is an abbreviation of Joachimsthaler.

Next month will appear The House of Hancock by William T. Baxter, professor of accounting at the University of Cape Town. This publication is one of the Harvard Studies in Business History, edited by Professor N. S. B. Gras; prior to public sale, copies are being sent to members of the Business Historical Society.

A short volume has recently been published by the Texas State Historical Association on the history of a country store which is unique in style and content and unusual in its subject. The book is Charles Schreiner, General Merchandise, by J. Evetts Haley. Written largely from the records of the Charles Schreiner Company, of Kerrville, Texas, and the memories of old-timers of the community, the volume tells a story of business which began in the hill country of Texas on December 24, 1869, a story of success which is still continuing.

How many readers of the BULLETIN have seen or known about the Adam Smith Collection at the Baker Library of Harvard University? The Collection was presented to the Library by Dean Homer Vanderblue of the School of Commerce, Northwestern University, who was at one time a member of the faculty of the Harvard Business School.

The attention of the readers of the BULLETIN is called to a new volume (V) in the series, A History of American Life. The book is The Completion of Independence, 1790-1830 by Professor John Allen Krout of Columbia University and President Dixon Ryan Fox of Union College. The series is a social history. The recent book gives a very readable and effective account of various aspects of American development at the beginning of the period of great expansion and change in the nineteenth century. It is notable because of the way it treats the history of business.

At the end of the selections from Mellon's autobiography published in the December issue of the Bulletin, the author, having put his new banking house in order, was off on a trip to New Orleans. The present Bulletin carries his narrative forward from the time of his return until 1884, when his autobiography ends.

The general thread of interest which runs through the story of business experience from 1872 to 1884 is that of panic, liquidation, and recovery. The author gives an unusually good account of what happened during the panic, and he also tries to explain the coming of the panic of 1873 and the severe liquidation which followed.

There has recently come to the editor's desk a copy of a booklet entitled Historical Societies in the United States and Canada: a Handbook. This booklet lists 1,467 historical organizations in the two countries, most of which are small local societies. For each of some 900 of these, the booklet gives the officers, the number of members, the annual income, a brief statement of the contents of the society's library or museum, and its publications.

There is in the city of Danzig on the Baltic Sea a medieval painting which is of unusual interest in the history of business. It is an altarpiece, the “Last Judgment” by Hans Memling, the inimitable fifteenth-century artist of the Low Countries. Besides being a great work of art, this picture is in a sense an important business record. It is, moreover, in a real way a product of business; its origin was intimately tied in with international mercantile activity in the fifteenth century. War prevented the “Last Judgment” from occupying the place for which it was intended, and wars have continued to give it an insecure existence. The present conflict in Europe may result in another removal, possibly back to Bruges, the place of the activity of those medieval business men whom it is said to commemorate.

The above was the subject of a session at the annual meeting of the American Economic History Association held in Princeton, New Jersey, late in September of the present year. The main paper was presented by Dr. Stanley Pargellis of the Newberry Library in Chicago. The discussion was led by Mr. Ralph Budd, president of the Burlington Lines, by Professor Colston Warne of Amherst College, and Professor Kent Healy of Yale University. Lively discussion followed from the floor.

Why are some men notably successful in business? In the case of one of the most outstanding American business families we have the story of the beginnings of the family's success as told in the autobiography of its founder. That story is a significant one.

Business men have been notable collectors. Perhaps more than any other group, they have been able to exercise the universal acquisitive propensity of mankind. They have had both the financial means to buy the objects they wanted and the contacts that made it practicable to collect.