1897.] MINUTES. 433 



of Fractnr looses its cunning and the fading art ceases to exist in 

 the memory of a generation yet living. 



The establishment of the English school system in Bucks county 

 in 1854^ necessarily resulted in the suppression of the previously 

 existing German schools. Hence that date after which the latter, 

 sustained by private subscription, lingered on for a time, reasonably 

 marks the end of Fractur in a region where at least two aged mas- 

 ters of the craft still survive in the person of Jacob Gross, of New 

 Britain, and John H. Detweiler, of Perkasie. 



A study of these fugitive examples of a venerated handwriting 

 leads the investigator by sure steps from the Germany of Pennsyl- 

 vania to the valley of the Rhine, from the backwoods schoolhouse 

 to the mediaeval cloister. In the fading leaflets we recognize pro- 

 totypes of the glowing hand-made volumes that illuminated learning 

 in the Middle Ages and still glorify the libraries of the Old World. 

 From the paint-box of Bedminster to the priceless book which 

 at Venice is shown to the delighted visitor as the handiwork of 

 Hans Memling, we are led by a chain of intimately related facts. 

 With strange sensations, we rescue from the Pennsylvaiiian garret 

 evidence indisputable of the passing away in the New World of 

 one of the fairest arts of the cloister, which, meeting its death-blow 

 at the invention of printing, crossed the Atlantic to linger among 

 the pious descendants of the German reformers until recent years. 



Stated Meeting^ October i, 1897. 



Mr. Ingham in the Chair. 



Present, 11 members. 



Donations to the Library and Cabinet were reported, and 

 thanks were ordered for them. 



1 A German school sustained by a private subscription was taught by the 

 Mennonite Samuel Musselman, in Swartley's schoolhouse, at the lower end of 

 Hilltown, Bucks county, Pa., about 1866. Information of Mr, J. F. Hendricks 

 Doylestown. Another, the last in Bucks county, existed, under the tuition of Mr. 

 Meyers, of Deep Run, at the old Mennonite Schoolhouse near the meeting house 

 at Deep Run, Bucks county. Pa., in the winters of 1895-96 and 1896-97. At 

 the latter school where a pair of the time-honored leathern spectacles {Bocks- 

 brille or Schulbrille) now in possession of the Bucks County Historical Society, 

 were used to punish children in 1897, ^^ ceiling rafters are still inscribed with 

 bars of music written in chalk. 



