The readers of the Bulletin are already acquainted with the Genoese cartularia, the bulky volumes in which mediaeval notaries of Genoa copied their notarial instruments. Those notarial records are a mirror of life in mediaeval Genoa. Notaries were called upon to record international treaties, state decrees, and local regulations; they recorded business transactions, which were all made in a notary's presence, ranging from large transactions involving considerable sums of money to small ones of a few pence; and, besides, notaries wrote out and copied in their books promises, agreements, or contracts of a most intimate and personal kind.

One of the precious nursery tales of business tells of a poor boy who became Lord Mayor of London Town.

The number of historians who have touched upon the Morrill Tariff in 1861 is equaled only by the variety of ways in which they have interpreted it. Such a complex subject obviously cannot be treated definitively in the two documents that are presented in this note. On the other hand, it does seem reasonable that these two documents may prove of interest to every student of tariff history and hold a warning for all historians: that the simplified interpretation of our economic development in terms of sections or large economic groups frequently is not borne out by factual evidence. Indeed, most careful historians will agree that it is impossible to dismiss a major tariff law with a generalization like “this section was for it, and that section was against it.”

A small bundle of miscellaneous bits of old business material has recently come to the Baker Library through the courtesy of Dr. Frank S. Churchill of Bass River, Massachusetts.