In Our last issue, we printed a summary of the recent steps taken in regard to affiliated membership in the Society. The account there given of our aims and methods is amplified and illustrated by the following typical extract from a letter sent out by the Chairman of the committee this last summer.

“Our plumber, being employed in the tower of the church about the repairs of the roof, and not extinguishing his fire in the evening, but fatally and most foolishly covering it with ashes, that he might the more readily set to work in the morning, went down to supper; and when, after supper, all our servants had gone to bed, a strong wind rising from the north speedily brought on our great calamity.

The first important and courageous improvement in inland transportation to reach fruition in the United States was the Middlesex Canal uniting Boston and Chelmsford and the upper reaches of the Merrimac River. It was built under stress and hardship when the science of civil engineering in this country was in its infancy. Today one short segment of the trough of the former waterway is a public parking place for pleasure cars, another segment forms the cellars of a row of workmen's houses, much of the line in those places where it is not covered by streets, warehouses, railroads, and residences is merely a dry ditch. The canal in any complete form remains principally as a faint memory in the minds of some few members of the oldest living generation.

The generosity of one of our members has furnished us with the original of the interesting cut on the following page. As will be noted, it is a court declaration as to the price of fish, made at Boston in 1704. The signature is that of Edward Brattle, a member of a well-known Boston family.

The same member has also donated to the Society a number of other original pieces.

The suggestion has been made that we have not heretofore clearly brought out the exact process by which new members can be welcomed into our fold, or how contributions of books and documents or funds for the purchase thereof, can be made to the Society.

Please send the names of new or prospective members — all of the friends you think might be interested in our undertaking — to (1) Mr. Frank C. Ayres, Secretary, 1277 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Mass., for regular members; (2) Professor Arthur H. Cole (same address) for affiliated members. Send all shipments of books, manuscripts or documents to C. C. Eaton, Librarian, 1277 Massachusetts Ave., with a bill for packing and shipping charges.

In the Bulletin of the American Iron and Steel Association for January 30,1889, there appears the obituary notice and a biographical sketch of the late Samuel M. Felton, one of the founders of the iron and steel industry of this country, whose collection of industrial literature has just been presented by his family to our Society. As the Bulletin remarks, “it was a remarkable era in our industrial history which produced such men and they were themselves remarkable men. There were giants in the land in those days.” Mr. Felton at the time of his death was president of the Pennsylvania Steel Company and had been its head from its organization in 1865. This was the company which first made a commercial success of the manufacture of Bessemer steel rails.

Some time ago, an agent of the Business Historical Society located for us a collection of early customs records, many of them manuscript. Unfortunately no funds were available and the papers went elsewhere. Recently they again came to light, and this time, some money being forthcoming, the Society bought them. The papers, from the district to which they mainly relate, have been provisionally termed the Marblehead Collection. The bulk of them consists of port records — entries and clearances, customs officials' correspondence, dating from about 1790 and running to about 1825, with some similar material for the period of the 'thirties and 'forties. There are also a large number of printed customs instructions, circulars to officers, and so on. These run from about 1840 to about 1868.

It has been the misfortune of the Business Historical Society to lose within the first year of its existence three of its founders: John Wingate Weeks, died July 12; Charles Chauncey Stillman, died August 17; and Frank W. Remick, died October 16. They were, all three, men of great business administrative ability and eminent for their public spirit.

While it may be doubted whether a great general who was also a great author gave expression to the precise sentiments which Mr. Shaw chooses to place in his mouth, yet it is nevertheless true that men of action, intent on the things of the present, are as a rule negligent, if not scornful, of the things of the past. A case could perhaps be made out for the thesis that just as old men live on memories so it is only when the spring-time of the race is over that much interest is manifested in what has gone by. Be this as it may, our own age differs markedly from others, even from a period so near to us as the eighteenth century, in the zeal with which it seeks to collect and preserve its ancestral heirlooms. Our forbears were apt to regard times antecedent to their own as rude and contemptible; they had escaped from a wilderness and were not anxious to be reminded of it.

A story of vital human interest for Engineers, Artists, and Business students has been revealed in a collection of documents belonging to the Business Historical Society.

A professor in Harvard University recently called upon the Librarian of the Business Historical Society for a copy of the Reports of the Engineers of the Western Railroad Corporation made to the Directors in 1836-37, by George Washington Whistler, William Gibbs McNeill, and William H. Swift. A copy of this report was found in the Moore collection of the Business Historical Society, and in locating it, the Librarian found also the manuscript of the report partly in the handwriting of George Washington Whistler, father of the artist James A. McNeill Whistler.