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.

The primary purpose of The Business Historical Society, Inc., is to encourage and aid the study of the evolution of business in all periods and in all countries.

A collection of early railroad history has been added to The Business Historical Society Collection. It covers the early history of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad Company.

Demetrius Phalereus, who was library keeper to the king, was now endeavoring, if it were possible, to gather together all the books that were in the habitable earth, and buying whatsoever was anywhere valuable.… And when once Ptolemy asked him, How many ten thousands of books he had collected? He replied, that he had already about twenty times ten thousand, but that, in a little time, he should have fifty times ten thousand.

The generosity of a Founder Member of The Business Historical Society, Mr. N. Penrose Hallowell, who has contributed the sum of $1,000 to the Society, has resulted in the acquisition of a large collection of miscellaneous books, pamphlets, pictures, broadsides, maps, and manuscript from Rutland, Vermont.