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.

Although Dr. Einstein has shaken our faith in the very existence of an absolute standard of measure or weight, the expression of length, area, volume and weight by comparison with standards which to our senses appear to be stable will continue to be a necessity of human society, even of the very existence of mankind. As John Quincy Adams stated it:

“Weights and measures may be ranked among the necessaries of life to every individual…. They enter the economical arrangements and daily concerns of every family. They are necessary to every occupation of human industry; to the distribution and security of every species of property; every transaction of trade and commerce; to the labors of the husbandman; to the ingenuity of the artificer; to the studies of the philosopher; to the researches of the antiquarian; to the navigation of the mariner and the marches of the soldier, to all the exchanges of peace and all the operations of war.”

The Society has just been presented with the business records of Bigelow, Kennard and Company, of Boston, one of the oldest jewelry firms in this country. The papers fill over sixty packing cases. A preliminary inspection of them has revealed about a dozen letters from an army officer, stationed in New Mexico in the early 1850's, shortly after it came into the possession of the United States, which give a most interesting glimpse at the isolated and sometimes adventurous life of an army post in the Apache country, and at the ways in which business reached the frontiers of the great West.

We are indebted to Mr. E. A. S. Clarke, Secretary of the American Iron and Steel Institute, for calling our attention to an article in the 1901 Transactions of the British Institute which places the oldest joint-stock enterprise in the world at Domnarfvet, Sweden. It is the Stora Kopparbergs (Great Copper Mountain) Mining Company, deriving its name from the celebrated copper mine at Falun, where one of its plants is located.

One of the primary purposes of the founders of The Business Historical Society was to effect the preservation of valuable historical documents and records which, for one reason or another, are so often destroyed by their owners. Not always, however, is the Society able to do so.

An amusing and at the same time heartbreaking instance came to its attention recently where an old Maine farmhouse had been subjected to a housecleaning, and where the owners reported they had found many letters signed by Abraham Lincoln. Supposing that the signatures might be of value, they clipped out all the signatures and burned the letters.

Last March, Mr. Franklin E. Parker, Jr., published in the Harvard Graduates' Magazine an article on the association organized for the aid and support of the Harvard College Library. In this article, the needs of a large and progressive library, and the ways in which the public can help to fill those needs, are so well presented that The Business Historical Society has obtained permission to reprint some extracts from it.

A Short time ago the Society came into possession of what is probably a unique collection. It is a potpourri from the history of transportation, fourteen bound volumes, and nearly twice as much loose material in boxes and folders — newspaper clippings, some of them dating back to the beginning of the last century, on turnpikes, canals, stages, taverns, railroads, steamboats, ferries, ships and shipbuilding, coal, express-riders, and every subject which could conceivably have had anything to do with transportation, including the ubiquitous lottery.

In An earlier issue of the Bulletin there was a description of an incunabulum printed at Venice in 1494, the first historical treatise on accountancy. Two months ago the Society acquired a volume which goes back even further into the cradle days of printing. It is a very early book on commerce. It was presented to the Society by Mr. Joseph P. Day in coöperation with officers of the Society.