The value of old tax data, as Professor Burbank has stated, lies in the wealth of detail in the tax lists, and more especially in the valuation lists. For each tax-payer these latter lists frequently give the amount and value of real estate, annual crops, live stock, stock in trade, shipping, mills of various sorts, warehouses, and occasionally even the silver plate owned by the family. Many of these headings, too, are in detailed form. For instance, real estate is divided into plow land, pasturage, orcharding, meadows, and wood land.

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 objects of the present work are: First to satisfy an imperious public curiosity, which has thus far been only partially gratified by the public journals.”

Thus begins the preface to The Income Record, A List giving the Taxable Income for the year 1863 of Every Resident of New York.

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.

Among the recent acquisitions of the Society is a bulky Latin volume which throws an interesting light on the difficulties which beset the business men of earlier days. It was printed in 1591 at Colonia Agrippinae (Cologne) and its crowded title page may be freely translated as follows: “Two Books on Money and Monetary Problems, the first dealing with the Art of Coinage and the second with Monetary Problems, to which are added Various Useful Tracts together with Opinions and Annotations, by authors both ancient and modern who have discussed Money, its Value, Alloy, Weight, Power, Alteration, Variation, Counterfeiting, and the like.” The author and editor, Renerus Budelius, was “prefect of moneys” under the Elector Ernest of Cologne.

In the museum of the Wedgwood firm at Etruria, Stoke-on-Trent, is a collection of more than a million manuscripts, the business papers of Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the firm (b. 1730, d. 1795). Invoices, ledgers, oven books, letters to his customers and his bankers, memoranda on the organization of his business and of the industry as a whole — there is a mass of material, incomplete and only gradually being got into order by the devoted labours of the Curator, Mr. Cook. Unfortunately no effort had been made at the time to preserve these records, which were therefore destroyed or dispersed.

Four volumes of this comprehensive view of the Western Hemisphere, written in 1795 by an English dissenting minister, are among the many curious items which are continually being added to the collection of the Society.

There has recently come to the Library a small collection of official “Appraisements of Estates,” all from Jefferson County, Georgia, and in date running from 1800 to 1820. These appraisements give an excellent idea of the nature of the small slave-holding estate of that period, the commodities, tools and implements upon it, the stock of household goods and the price of slaves.

If one were to calculate the value of the brown sugar alone that is consumed annually in East Boston, it would come to many times $3500.

In the days when New England lived on and through the sea, it was no unusual event for one of her tiny vessels to return home, after having spent three or four years knocking round the world, with its cost paid for and in its hold a cargo bought with a portion of its freight money. The modern imagination is struck with the tale of riches but is apt to relegate to the sphere of romance the chance stories of hardship and adventure that have come down.

A Northern Pacific item of great rarity and value will be added to the Library files when the business collection of the Boston Public Library comes into the keeping of the Business Library. This pamphlet, a “Partial report… of a reconnoissance made in the summer of 1869, between Lake Superior and the Pacific Ocean, by Thos. Hawley Canfield, general agent of the company, accompanied with notes on Puget Sound by Samuel Wilkeson, Esq., the historian of the expedition,” recently changed hands for $150 at an auction.

A fifteenth century quittance, the oldest business document so far acquired by the Society, has come recently from Professor David Eugene Smith of Columbia University. Professor Smith is himself an enthusiastic collector, particularly in the line of the history of mathematics, and early Arabian literature on astronomy and mathematics.

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 Library has recently acquired a fairly complete set, from volume 5 on, of the London Economist. There is probably only one that is complete in the United States, and the Harvard Business Library is very fortunate in having a set that compares favorably with any of the others to be found in this country.

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.

The above title is used to designate temporarily the numerous runs of chemical engineering journals for the period 1890-1920 which have just come in by purchase from the library of H. J. Williams. Mr. Williams was for many years the chemical expert in the fuel division of the Boston Elevated Railway Company.

To write the history of an industry in the days before income-tax returns and statistical departments is a baffling task. In the absence of complete records of any sort, — for the industry, for a locality, or even for a single company, — every scrap of evidence becomes a pearl of great price. Every production sheet or worker's contract, every order for machinery or letter about the business, must be used to fill in the blank spaces of the picture.