Sometime in the eighteenth century, Marie, sister of Jacobus Perier of Batavia, East Indies, married Pierre Dutilh, son of Abel. In the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library are 12,000 to 15,000 items of Dutilh business correspondence, written in French, Spanish, Hollandish, German, and English during the years 1755-1874, the bulk being from 1755-1803. These are arranged chronologically, but have not been indexed.

Written from the outside with access to inside information and records, Professor Hower's History of an Advertising Agency: N. W. Ayer & Son at Work avoids the over-praise of a memorial volume written solely from within an organization, and at the same time has more reality than the cold clinical history of an individual or institution written solely from public records.

An interesting account of a business career has recently come into the possession of Baker Library. The Autobiography of Caspar Thomas Hopkins, a California pioneer, has been obtained by copying the original in the possession of one of his daughters, Mrs. Frank Hinckley. This story of his life was written in 1889, not for the public but for the edification of his daughters. It has therefore the special value of being a very frank record of his experiences and his achievements. The whole book is most interesting but here we are considering only his work in insurance. His youth will be touched on to give an idea of his early training.

The month of May, just passed, marked the hundredth anniversary of the oldest chartered bank in the State of Wisconsin. The Marine National Exchange Bank of Milwaukee is the result of the merging in 1930 of two pioneer institutions, the National Exchange Bank which was first chartered by Wisconsin in 1855 and the Marine National Bank, chartered under the National Banking Act in 1900, under the free banking act of Wisconsin in 1853, and originally chartered by the legislature of Wisconsin Territory as the Wisconsin Marine and Fire Insurance Co. in 1839.

During the month of June the Society will send to its members Business and Capitalism by Professor N. S. B. Gras.

Ours is not the only period in which business men have had annoying restrictions placed upon their activities by outside agencies. In the Middle Ages business was almost completely controlled by regulations imposed by the gilds, by political rulers, and by the Church. The gilds restricted the number of persons permitted to enter given occupations, sometimes established prices which would be fair primarily to the consumer and would allow only a small profit to the producer, and attempted to exercise control over the volume of production.

Interest in the safeguarding of the records of business houses in Great Britain began to be manifested about a generation ago, when it was realized that an intelligent use of the books of textile mill-owners enabled the historian to give a more convincing account of the industrial revolution in the North than had hitherto been available.

In this day, when insecure living and working conditions have come to be recognized as a great problem in social security, it is interesting to see how one industrial firm attacked that problem almost a century ago. The firm was the Waltham Watch Co., and the executive responsible for its labor management was Aaron Dennison. The watch company was one of three large manufacturing enterprises started by Dennison. The others were the Dennison Manufacturing Co., of Framingham, Massachusetts, and the Dennison Watch Case Co., of Birmingham, England.

George Washington Whistler, the father of the artist, ended his civil engineering career as consultant to the Russian Czar after a life of distinguished service in the planning and construction of pioneer American railroads, including the Baltimore & Ohio and the present Boston & Albany.

There was once a Journal of Economic and Business History published by the Business Historical Society and the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. Four bound volumes and an extra supplementary volume are on the shelf before us. They represent the combined efforts of many scholars in America and Europe. The depression caught the Journal only part way up the hill and sent it down again. Countless letters have come in to ask why we do not start up again or when the Journal will be reestablished. Just today such an inquiry came from a government bureau in Europe.

The addition to the Business School Library of the Kress collection on business and economics presents as great an opportunity and challenge to the business historian as it does to the student interested in economic or politico-economic history. Here, for the first time at Harvard, is available a large collection of writings extending back to the dawn of printing, which have never been extensively surveyed from the particular viewpoint of the business historian.

The collection, and the room in which it is housed, come to us through the generosity of Mr. Claude Washington Kress, of New York City. The books and pamphlets themselves, to the number in excess of thirty thousand, were assembled in his lifetime by Professor H. S. Foxwell, of Cambridge, England.

As students continue to re-work the field of American history, they turn up a great variety of new material. Some of it is of limited significance—the sparse gleanings that one expects to find where many careful reapers have been at work. But some of it is rich and important, as unexplored aspects of the past attract attention; and this is especially true of the growing knowledge about business in America's development. It is a striking paradox that while private enterprise was overwhelmingly dominant in American life, historians gave it not the slightest heed; but now, in a period when that dominance has definitely waned, historians are devoting an increasing amount of attention to the role of business in the growth of the nation.

The edifice occupied by the Hall of Records at Annapolis was completed only in 1935. Its erection was made possible as part of the Tercentenary Celebration of the State of Maryland. The Land Office was given quarters in the building and moved in during the early part of 1935. The Hall of Records, proper, was opened on October 1, 1935, at which time the present writer, the first archivist of Maryland, entered upon his duties.

An address delivered by Dr. Ralph M. Hower at the Annual Meeting of the Business Historical Society.

I propose to interpret my subject rather liberally and to concentrate upon what seem to me to be some fundamental changes in retailing—ranging the whole of the 19th century, but focussing attention especially upon the years from 1850 to 1875, a period of great innovation. And please note that all my remarks have to do with American experience.

To start, then, let me sketch briefly the retailing picture in the larger American cities about 1850. In general the principle of specialization dominated the scene: both retail and wholesale trades were split up, by types of merchandise, into single-line or specialty stores. If you examine the advertisements and business directories of the period, you will find a really astonishing array of stores, each of which confined itself to a narrow range of goods.