When this subject was presented to me it appeared quite clearly as a challenge. When I first became interested in the history of business, it was as a study somewhat divorced from the ordinary routine of affairs. I was a student of economic history who had become convinced that the fundamental approach to this subject was along the line of private enterprise. Now I am asked to point out what value there may be in business history to the business man. At the very beginning of this discussion I ought to make a distinction between two types of business history; one, the history of individual business firms; the other, business history in general.

This summer when I was in Rome, I went to the Vatican, at Mr. Ayres' suggestion, to see what I could discover as to the history of the Barberini-Sciarra di Colonna family whose account books have just been presented to The Business Historical Society. I met all sorts of obstacles.

The name “Russell and Company,” heading a package of business papers and correspondence, which lay for years a prey to white ants before they found their way to the Society, recalls perhaps the most romantic and one of the most remunerative of the trades carried on by American sailing vessels. Russell and Company was the best-known American house at Canton in the pre-treaty period, when a few foreign merchants carried on a business there which ran up into the millions, in teas, silks, furs, sandalwood, opium, and western manufactured goods. A consolidation of several of the principal American firms, the company was for years the principal representative of the American business in Canton. The papers were a gift from Mr. Robert Shewan, of Shewan Tomes and Company, of Hong Kong.

An item of timely interest has been discovered among a pile of old records given to the Baker Library by the United States Court of Appeals, in the facsimile of a notebook kept by Thomas A. Edison during his experiments on the carbon telephone transmitter.