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.

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.

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.

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.