1897.] 



MERCER — SURVIVAL OF ILLUMINATIVE WRITING. 



425 



Doylestovvn, as a novel and hitherto unattempted illustration of the 

 Anyerican beginning. 



Among the manifold suggestions involved in the genealogy of 

 such objects as the reaper's cradle, the American carpenter's hatchet 

 and pitching axe, the Dutch scythe and the wooden plow, carrying 

 investigation from America to various parts of Europe, a rude, lid- 

 less paint-box, fastened with wooden pegs, long puzzled us. 



l**3 



Fig. I. Paint box used by German schoolmaster about 1820 in the execution 

 of Fractur or illuminative German handwriting. Museum, No. 103, Bucks 

 County Historical Society. Presented to the Society by Tobias Nash, of Wor 

 mansville. 



About a foot long by six inches broad, with several compartments 

 containing little glass bottles, it was finally explained as one of the 

 color-boxes of teachers of the German schools, superseded in 

 Bucks county fifty years a^o. Using it as a receptacle for their 

 home-made pens, brushes and colors, they had instructed scholars in 

 the art of Fractur or illuminative handwriting until about the year 

 1840. 



With great interest, we learned that the time- stained box found 

 in one of the garrets of Bedminster had long ago in its longest 

 compartment contained goose-quill pens, and brushes made of the 

 hair of the domestic cat ; that the caked colors in the small bottles 

 had been the home-mixed inks and paints of the master once liquefied 

 in whisky, and that the varnish was composed of the gum of the 

 cherry tree diluted in water. 



Working with these primitive tools, often lit at his task, let us 

 suppose, by the once familiar boat-shaped lard lamps suspended 

 upon trammels of wood, the pioneer schoolmaster at the log school- 

 houses produced in the latter part of the last century and the 



