The autobiography of David Augustus Neal, of Salem, in a real sense epitomizes New England's business experience from the 1790's to the Civil War. Not that it is concerned with business only. It is rich in family history, in its picture of education and life in Salem, in travel observations, and in adventure, but it is singularly informative on business.

The present year marks the hundredth anniversary of regular transatlantic steamship service. On April 23, 1838, two commercial steamships arrived in New York from England, one, the Great Western, initiating a regular service. In 1938 the anniversary received only scant notice in the newspapers of New York, but in 1838 the arrival, stay, and departure of the ships, with the attendant festivities and observations, were fully recorded in the press of the day.

Very little is known about Collard de Marke, whose account books I examined in the Municipal Archives of Bruges in the summer of 1937, except that he was one of the sixteen money-changers licensed to practice in Bruges during the 1360's. That much is clear from the municipal records in which he is listed among the money-changers who were fined because they had exchanged nobles (a Flemish coin) at an illegal rate. His account books are of great value to the business historian because they show very definitely that the medieval money-changers did not confine themselves to mere exchange transactions and to trade in gold and silver, but that, as early as the middle of the fourteenth century, they had extended their field of activity by going into the banking business. They received money on deposit and made loans to reliable customers.

Mr. John A. Sessions, a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, has brought to the office of the Society a very interesting collection of manuscript material which concerns the business of Charles Porter Phelps, who early in the nineteenth century was a lawyer and a merchant in Boston.