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.

An item of timely interest has been discovered among a pile of old records given to the Baker Library by the United States Court of Appeals, in the facsimile of a notebook kept by Thomas A. Edison during his experiments on the carbon telephone transmitter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the small items of interest which has come to the Society consists of three papers, dated in the fall and winter of 1841, relating to a ball given in Boston for the Prince de. Joinville. The Prince was the third son of Louis-Philippe, the “bourgeois king” of France, who came to the throne when the revolution of 1830 had deposed the reactionary Charles X.

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.

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.”

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.