THE ALUMNI JOURNAL 39 



The goods which are shipped to Amsterdam, the more im- 

 portant ones at least, are offered at public auction, but the Am- 

 sterdam auctions are conducted in a different manner ; a manner 

 strange, perhaps, to most people in the States and in my opinion 

 better calculated to bring a higher price to the seller. They sell 

 goods there at auction by a method called "inscription"; that is 

 to say, the buyer hands in a sealed bid and the man whose bid is 

 the highest gets the goods. He does not know what his com- 

 petitor has bid ; he is completely in the dark in this respect. It has 

 happened that we bought goods there at a lower price than the 

 price which we were ready to pay and again, that goods for which 

 we thought we were offering the top notch figure escaped us, much 

 to our chagrin. The goods offered at the auctions are stored in 

 warehouses and samples mar be drawn long before the time 

 of sale, so that brokers may mail them to their foreign principals. 

 For instance, take Cinchona Bark ; the bark is offered, samples 

 are drawn, the goods assayed, and the samples mailed to us. Then 

 we make our selection and put in our bid (through our broker). 



Now, as to our own city ; Xew York is in one respect the most 

 important drug market of the world ; it is the biggest distributing 

 market. More goods are distributed from Xew York directly 

 to the consuming trade than from any other place, and prices 

 are dependent more on the conditions of the Xew York market than 

 on those of any other one point ; I have remarked before how 

 happy the Hamburg people feel when they hear that New York 

 is buying. The price of natural products depends on the supply 

 and demand, and while the question of demand — which I use in 

 the sense of consumption — is pretty well established, the matter 

 of supply is a subject of great fluctuation. When, to name a 

 concrete example, the weather in the North Atlantic is stormy 

 during January, February and March, and in consequence the 

 fishermen are hampered in catching cod-fish, or when the weather 

 is unusually cold and the fish do not come up in time, or when 

 it is too warm and they go North too early, the catch of cod- 

 fish is diminished and it is the business of the well informed 

 buver to keep posted as to these conditions. Now, we here in 

 Xew York aim to get all that information (and we do get it 

 pretty accurately) and we buy or not, according to the information 

 which we receive, based on our experience. Being such large 



