Funding a fund;

              38 HASKINS & SELLS May
Funding a Fund
angle he knew. Perhaps he would have
said the same thing about funds. The
fact, however, remains that there appears
to be no necessity for breaking down prac­tices
which have become established and
are gradually being accepted without bet­ter
reason than the whim or notion of
some individual.
The struggle to bring order out of
chaos in the matter of nomenclature has
been long and hard. It is still going on
with scant measure of progress being ex­hibited
from time to time. The time prob­ably
is far distant when accountants, law­yers,
engineers, and business men will speak
the same accounting language. There are a
few things, however, to which one can pin,
and argue and contend for. One of these
is that a fund is an asset, and no one
should be permitted, without objection, to
call it anything else.
The occasion for voicing this particular
objection arises out of reading an article
which recently appeared in a leading publi­cation
devoted to accounting matters, on
IF it were possible to go back four hun­dred
and thirty years and discuss mat­ters
with Lucas Pacioli, who laid the
foundation for modern accounting, it
would be interesting to obtain his views on
the use of the term "fund." Probably no
other accounting term has been more ban­died
about than this unfortunate noun.
Definitions leave no doubt as to the
meaning of the word. Writers having the
weight of authority, and those without,
repeatedly have likened it to an asset. One
of the oldest usages finds it invariably on
the asset side of the balance sheet. And
yet, every now and then some author,
either through ignorance, or with a desire
to block the wheels of progress in the field
of terminology, brings in the term on the
liabilities side as if it were entirely proper.
The question of what is proper may de­pend
on one's point of view. The Eng­lishman
who, when he saw an American
balance sheet for the first time, said,
"Fancy putting the liabilities on the wrong
side," looked at the matter from the only