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In 1943, with the Second World War raging, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce began (rather optimistically) to plan for the coming peace, and they invited the Waterloo and Kitchener Boards of Trade to participate in an experimental fact-finding survey of Waterloo County (now Waterloo Region), to determine "economic facts about the past and present and the expectations of the future in their district".¹

In 1871, the Ontario Pharmacy Act was passed, establishing the Ontario College of Pharmacy.

Special Collections & Archives is currently under way with a bold new plan to barcode all of our materials (as the main library did in 1977). This project will ultimately give us greater control over our holdings both in terms of space available for new collections and also in terms of allowing us to better track the use of our collections.

While this is exciting enough on its own, co-op student Eva Lau discovered some material in an archival box that had been uncatalogued.

In 1923, the first specimen (a molar) of a new human ancestor was found in Zhoukoudian, near Beijing, China. Many more fossils were found in the area, and Canadian paleontologist Davidson Black named this new ancestor Sinanthropus pekinensis, "Peking Man" (after the city of Beijing, spelled Peking before the Pinyin romanization system was adopted. The city was also known as Beiping or Peiping from 1928 to 1949). Today Sinanthropus is considered to be an example of Homo erectus.