The Society has just been presented with the business records of Bigelow, Kennard and Company, of Boston, one of the oldest jewelry firms in this country. The papers fill over sixty packing cases. A preliminary inspection of them has revealed about a dozen letters from an army officer, stationed in New Mexico in the early 1850's, shortly after it came into the possession of the United States, which give a most interesting glimpse at the isolated and sometimes adventurous life of an army post in the Apache country, and at the ways in which business reached the frontiers of the great West.

Although Dr. Einstein has shaken our faith in the very existence of an absolute standard of measure or weight, the expression of length, area, volume and weight by comparison with standards which to our senses appear to be stable will continue to be a necessity of human society, even of the very existence of mankind. As John Quincy Adams stated it:

“Weights and measures may be ranked among the necessaries of life to every individual…. They enter the economical arrangements and daily concerns of every family. They are necessary to every occupation of human industry; to the distribution and security of every species of property; every transaction of trade and commerce; to the labors of the husbandman; to the ingenuity of the artificer; to the studies of the philosopher; to the researches of the antiquarian; to the navigation of the mariner and the marches of the soldier, to all the exchanges of peace and all the operations of war.”