In 1711, Englishmen interested in news from North America were entertained by a representation of the efficiency displayed by Canadian beavers in dam building, engraved in the border of a “New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great Britain” on this continent. The map is in an atlas of Herman Moll, a prominent British cartographer of the early eighteenth century. The atlas is a recent acquisition of the Society. This particular map is in great demand by public utility companies, as the first historical reference to the production of water power in America, and copies of it, when they can be found, bring from two to three hundred dollars.

Sir William Petty, in the seventeenth century, says, “A Lottery…is properly a tax upon unfortunate self-conceited fools…. Wherefore, a Lottery is not tolerated without authority, assigning the proportion in which the people shall pay for their errors, and taking care that they be not much or so often couzened, as they themselves would be.”

When to-day the visitor to one of the fairest countrysides in the world sees Saint Malo rise proudly from its rocky islet, surrounded by ancient walls, like a vessel about to put out to sea, he finds it difficult to imagine that this port once played a great part in the commercial and maritime history of France. Nowadays a great port must be situated at the mouth of a great river or it must serve as outlet for a rich agricultural and industrial region. It must be capable of accommodating ships of large tonnage. Saint Malo fulfills none of these conditions. But, until the nineteenth century, when boats, even those engaged in making voyages to distant parts of the world, were of very slight tonnage, (generally from 200 to 400 tons), conditions were different. Saint Malo was a busy port with an active commercial life. The development of a commission and carrying trade rendered an important and fruitful hinterland less necessary then than now; and in troublous times the security afforded by a strong military situation was much appreciated.

Among the collection of prints on economic and business subjects belonging to the Harvard Business School are two of the old French port of Saint Malo. A fine engraving of a map of the same town has recently come to the School from the noted French scholar, Léon Vignols, together with other interesting prints on such subjects.

The recent accession of the Hancock papers to The Business Historical Society collection recalls a now forgotten type of merchant once prevailing in Europe and America. He was sometimes called the merchant prince; certainly he represents the highest class of business man from at least the thirteenth to the early nineteenth century. Sometimes he operated alone; sometimes with his brothers or cousins in the form of a family partnership.

On April 10, 1928, the first complete periodical ever sent over the telephone wires was issued by a Cambridge firm.

A collection of manuscripts, replete with details which rebuild the picture of foreign commerce in the 1840s and 1850s, has recently been given to The Business Historical Society by Mr. Gordon Dexter, whose father, an officer in most of the companies whose papers make up the collection, preserved the records which have so fully come down to us. It is chiefly composed of the cheques, bills, accounts, contracts and correspondence of William Appleton and Company, and the successor of that firm, Samuel Hooper and Company, merchant shipowners of the type described in the previous article.

An old ledger, which has come to the Society, belonging to the proprietor of the Boston Exchange Coffee House, recalls the part once played by taverns in social and commercial life.

“The Industrial and Commercial Correspondence of Alexander Hamilton,” the first book published under the auspices of The Business Historical Society, incorporated, was sent to each member of the Society toward the last of February.

Probably few members of the present generation, who shudder at the inhumanity of the old laws allowing imprisonment for debt, realize that it is still allowable under the laws of certain states. In New York and Pennsylvania, for example, a man may be imprisoned for debt incurred by neglect or misconduct in any professional employment. In Nevada, he may lose his liberty for nonpayment of damages arising out of cases of fraud, libel and slander. And in Massachusetts, he may be sent to prison even for ordinary breach of contract if he owes as much as twenty dollars, exclusive of costs, and if his creditor can prove any one of six charges, among them, “that since the debt was contracted the debtor has hazarded or paid money or other property to the value of $100 or more in some kind of gaming prohibited by the law of the State.”

The Byron Weston Company, paper manufacturers of Dalton, Massachusetts, have been using the historical route to publicity through a contest for the purpose of unearthing old American documents. The prize stories were collected into a book entitled “Dead Men Tell Unusual Tales,” and The Business Historical Society has been presented with a copy.

Building was an event in seventeenth-century America. In 1637, a “schoale, or colledge,” for which the Massachusetts General Court had voted four hundred pounds the previous year, was “ordered to be at New Towne.” The next year, the name of New Towne was changed to Cambridge, and the “colledge was ordered to be called Harvard College.” Thirty-four years later, the first building was falling into disrepair. The towns of the colony were called upon to make an appropriation for a new one, “of brick and stone,” and the agency for building it was given to Deacon John Cooper and one William Manning.

The papers of “Israel Thorndike, Esq.” are the first manuscript collection arranged and mounted by Baker Library. They are fragmentary first hand tales of shipwrecks; of the capture and imprisonment of sailors and sea captains; of trading meat, metals and upland cotton for silks and spices (these were the early days of the American pepper trade), by bright, vivid young captains and supercargoes who were virtually agents of a wealthy house, and whose reports of the market and conditions in foreign seaport towns were a valuable portion of America's knowledge of foreign economic and political affairs.

The founding of a society in Norton, Massachusetts, in 1797, for the detecting of horse thieves bears witness that the crime wave is a perennial phenomenon.