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It is a great honor, deeply appreciated, to be chosen first president of the Economic History Association. I cannot pretend to act as spokesman for this newly organized scientific group. I assume that I owe my present honor and responsibility partly to the number of years I have imperfectly taught economic history—and, I hope, stimulated some interest in it—and partly to your recognition of the principle of historical continuity. For I was a student under Schmoller at Berlin; he in turn was a pupil of Roscher (whose last lectures at Leipsic I heard); and Roscher, almost a century ago, was one of the first historical economists and the original formulator of a program for the new “school” of economics. I wish to recall to your attention these beginnings of our discipline in order to emphasize how the subsequent shift in its development has made us economic historians instead of historical economists.

The contributions of the chain length, chain structure, internal rigidity, segment potential function, and “combinatorial” configurational entropy to the properties of liquid short-chain molecules and their mixtures, as exemplified by the polyphenyl series, are all shown to be significant in terms of general models of simple chain molecules such as those of Prigogine and co-workers and of Flory. The molecular parameters of these systems can be characterized sufficiently well from thermodynamic data on the short polyphenyl isomers and g. l. c. data on benzene dissolved in them so that the application of the models with minimal empirical adjustment can be justified. Fit with experimental data is entirely satisfactory. Simpler models ordinarily used, which include only Flory-Huggins entropy of mixing and regular solution or rigid lattice approximations for the heat of mixing, may thus neglect contributions similar in magnitude to those included. The practical significance of the various contribution...

Gay F. Aspects de l’agriculture berrichonne au Moyen-Âge d’après les textes des inventaires des établissements religieux. In: Norois, n°18, Avril-Juin 1958. pp. 191-201.

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The opinion has recently been expressed by a competent student of the sixteenth century that the inclosures of that period, both those which turned the old open fields into sheep farms, thereby evicting husbandmen from their holdings, and those which hedged in severalty the common pastures, were almost entirely responsible for the greater revolts which occurred under Tudor rule. Mr. Pollard specifies this cause of social discontent as mainly operative in the Pilgrimage of Grace, Wyatt's rebellion and that of 1569, as well as those of 1549, both east and west. Such a view ascribes, I think, an exaggerated importance to the inclosing movement of the time and fails to take due account of the combination of motives, political, religious, and social other than agrarian, which acted concurrently, though often at cross purposes, upon all classes, high and low, of a people which was passing reluctant and uncomprehending through an agitated era of transition. The thread of inclosure discontent, it is true, may be traced more or less plainly in these popular uprisings, but as only one of a tangled skein. Yet it is certainly a hasty generalisation, which, laying emphasis on this single element in a complex problem, declares that the masses who took part in all these cbellions were composed of ‘men who had been evicted from their tenements or who had been ground down to the verge of poverty by the loss of their rights to common—men who had nothing to hope from the existing social condition, and nothing to lose in case of failure.’

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Influence of Nitric Oxide on the Thermal Decomposition of Dimethyl Ether. Gaseous Catalysis