The early business career of motion pictures lies entangled in the correspondence and documents of the firm of Raff & Gammon which have been presented to our organization through the kindness of Terry Ramsaye, Editor-in-Chief of Pathé Exchange, Inc., New York. Lost in the volumes of vituperative letters from impatient dealers and the business negotiations of Raff & Gammon for the sale of monopoly rights for whole states, the business history of the industry awaits a thorough ransacking of the available documents. What is most apparent immediately is the excitement of the public in the new invention and the rush of the more adroit to seize the profits from its immediate exploitation.

That the tariff conflict of agricultural and manufacturing interests in the United States was not much different a hundred years ago than it is today is exemplified in an acquisition of the Business Historical Society, “A view of the ruinous consequences of a dependence on foreign markets for the sale of the great staples of this nation, Flour, Cotton, and Tobacco.” The author is Matthew Carey, one of the most vociferous protectionists writing after the crash of 1819.

The history of one of America's oldest importing houses contained in records for the period from 1798 to 1916 has been presented by Mr. and Mrs. William Henry Trotter of Philadelphia. William Trotter, Quaker, who organized the company in 1789, was an importer of metals, leather goods, textiles and miscellaneous commodities.

Five German monetary treatises written in the seventeenth century have reached the Business Historical Society through the generosity of Walter T. Rosen, Partner in Ladenburg, Thalman & Co. of New York. These books together with a late seventeenth century statement of English mercantilist theory were formerly in the Seligman collection.

An old hand-worn brown leather book has come into the hands of the Business Historical Society on the varied business activities of a New Englander for the period 1837 t o 1857. We are indebted to Edgar A. Clarke of New Hartford, Connecticut, for this rarity.

Two books on the history of Birmingham are catalogued in our library whose only resemblance is that both have as subject that famous industrial region in the heart of England. One called the “History of Birmingham to the end of the year 1780” by a W. Hutton was presented by H. B. Vanderblue, Vice-President of the Tri-Continental Corporation of New York. The second book, published in 1929, by G. C. Allen, Lecturer in Industrial Organization of the University of Birmingham is “The Industrial Development of Birmingham and the Black Country, 1860-1927.”

Who today can be compared with Robert Owen, the “great manufacturer with a bent for benevolence” who rebelled against the crudities of a vigorously expanding industrial organization? The difference between Owen and our great modern benefactors is perhaps that they are always manufacturers with a bent more or less accentuated for benevolence, while Owen's bent became a fanatical passion to redeem a hostilely suspicious world which ultimately repudiated him.

The volumes are ponderous. The title-page in sonorous and dignified language informs one that this is “A Dictionary of the English Language in which the WORDS are deduced from their ORIGINALS, and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers, to which are prefixed, a history of the language, and an English grammar. By Samuel Johnson, A.M. In Two Volumes.” The page is then topped off in good Johnsonian style with a nine-line Latin quotation from Horace.