rTHE original plan of this investigation was to study the movement of wholesale prices in Boston during both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.' This had not appeared an impossible task in view of the traditional frugality of the early New Englanders and the well-known prominence of Boston as an early trading center. These together probably had sufficed to create and to preserve abundant material in regard to Boston business in general and to her numerous trading enterprises. The results were surprising in many ways, showing as they did the utter lack of printed sources of price data and the paucity of other material giving similar information. Because of the former deficiency, this investigation becomes, as far as the writer knows, the first attempt to erect for an American colonial market a monthly index of wholesale commodity prices based solely on data from manuscript records. For other colonial markets, sources of price data were available which were more accessible and at least of more apparent merit. For his study of prices for Charleston, South Carolina, Professor Taylor found prices-current printed in the newspapers as far back as I 732. From that time on, with but few gaps, such quotations formed a regular part of the local news.2 In New York, prices-current appear occasionally in the periodicals from I720 on, and regularly after I748.3 For Philadelphia, too, this type of source is available far back into the eighteenth century.4 The story for Boston should be similar. Yet a painstaking search through all the papers published there before September I795 revealed the amazing fact that except for six months in I7I9-20, a few months in I789, and a portion of the years I792-94, no prices-current were published in the Boston newspapers.5 Another printed source sought for was the prices-current sent by local merchants to their clients and agents in other trading centers. These were similar to those published in the papers mentioned, but apparently were prepared and printed by the merchants themselves; and pricescurrent of this sort were known to have been issued from Philadelphia and other colonial ports. Neither in special collections nor in the numerous files of unsorted documents consulted in the course of this investigation was even a single one of these printed forms found which was dated from Boston before I795. The first part of this study is devoted to a description of the sources from which the data were gathered, the methods used in assembling them, and the statistical procedure thereafter followed. The annual data obtained from I700 on are presented and described on pages I2I-22; the monthly data from I750 to I795, on pages I25 and following. Monthly statistics of prices of individual commodities, I750-95, which, for reasons of space, could not be included here, will be published in a forthcoming issue of this REVIEW.