Unknown to many people in related fields, the business of factoring has enjoyed a remarkable increase in extent and importance during the past decade. The origins of this specialized business service are lost, like those of many other modern institutions, in the Middle Ages. Then, as today, factors served manufacturers and traders by selling goods on consignment in return for a commission; but in recent years they have turned increasingly to the financing of sales by advances on merchandise and the purchase of receivables. In fact, they have taken over a substantial share of the business which commercial bankers used, often reluctantly, to handle for small manufacturing concerns.

Among the papers presented to the Society by Mr. Gordon Dexter, whose death is noted in this issue of the Bulletin, are several communications relating to the Ship Living Age. This vessel was wrecked in 1855, shortly after leaving Shanghai, bound for New York with a cargo of teas. The story of the episode is of interest here because it not only recalls the dangerous adventures which were attached to sailing on the high seas in the nineteenth century but also the serious physical risks involved in foreign commerce less than a century ago, especially in the Pacific trade.

With the relations between management and labor being discussed on every hand today, the following notice is of topical interest. It reproduces the contents of a printed communication, now in the Society's collection, which was addressed to the employees of the Boston and Worcester Railroad shortly after the panic of 1857. The metaphor becomes somewhat confused as business changes from a ship in the first paragraph to a machine with wheels in the second, but the tone and logic of the appeal are attractive.