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.

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.”