426 MERCER — SURVIVAL OF ILLUMINATIVE WRITING. [Sept. 17, 



beginning of this, the beautiful illuminated hymns (see Plate V) 

 and ornate title-pages which when found in numbers among Men- 

 nonites in central Bucks county astonished and delighted us for the 

 first time in August, 1897.^ 



These glowing relics of the venerable stone farmhouses of eastern 

 Pennsylvania, sometimes falling to pieces through carelessness, some- 

 times preserved with veneration between the leaves of large Lutheran 

 Bibles, revealed by degrees to our investigation the following facts: 



First, That the art of Fractur was not confined to Bucks county 

 or to the Mennonites, who had presented us with the first specimens 

 seen, but that it had flourished throughout Pennsylvanian Germany, 

 among the Dunkers, the Schwenkfelders and probably the Amish 

 and Moravians. 



Second, That it had been chiefly perpetuated by deliberate in- 

 struction in German schools by German schoolmasters, and that it 

 had received its death blow at the disestablishment of the latter in 

 Bucks county in 1854. 



Third, That the art, always religious, had not been used for the 

 decoration of secular themes, such as songs, ballads or rhymes, but 

 had expressed itself in 



A. Illuminated Song Books, 



Such as the beautiful manuscript song books called Zionitischer 

 Rosen Garten^ and Paradisisches Wunder-Spiel, made by the monks 

 at Ephrata, and presented by Mr. Abram H. Cassell to the Penn- 

 sylvania Historical Society. 



B. The Title-pages to Small, Plain Manuscript Mennonite 



Song Books, 



Often giving the owner's name, with the date and the writer's 

 school, with illuminated borderings, overhanging tulips or lotus, 

 birds and angels blowing trumpets. For example : 



iThe observation was made while my Tools of the Nationtnaker was in press, 

 on August 20, 1897. I called attention to the special discoveries made in Bucks 

 county in Science (See Survival of the Art of Jlluttiinating Manuscripts 

 among the Germans in Eastern Pennsylvania, September 17, 1897), ^^ a 

 special meeting of the Bucks County Historical Society at Doylestown, October 

 7, 1897, ^'^^ i^ Tools of the Nationmaker, published by the Bucks County 

 Historical Society, Alfred Paschall, Doylestown, 1897, under the numbers 103, 

 633. 689, 726. 



