Briefer Notices

BRIEFER NOTICES By Henry J. Cadbury The magazine Antiques, LXXXVIII (1965), 32, 34, reports the acquisition at Old Sturbridge Village of the contents of a cabinet shop operated at Sandwich, Massachusetts, by the "unrecorded Quaker cabinetmaker Samuel Wing (17741854 )," including tools, patterns, account books. The gift was made by a Quaker descendant. "The most difficult matter in hand is to locate some examples of Wing's furniture." * » * "The Quakers in Pharmacy" by Margaret Stiles, M. P. S., is a section (pp. 113-130) in The Evolution of Pharmacy in Britain, edited by F. N. L. Poynter (Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, 1965). In England the publisher is Pitman Medical Publishing Co. * * * Of five proposed volumes on Worship and Theology in England by Horton Davies, the last three have now been published by the Princeton University Press. (See earlier reference to first two volumes in quaker history, LII, 1965, 116.) Volume III, "From Watts and Wesley to Maurice, 1690-1850" (1961) has a dozen pages (114-125) on the Quakers; and Volume V, "The Ecumenical Century, 1900-1965" (1965), a whole chapter (XI, pp. 398-412). The context of these books and their concentration on worship make these sections of special interest. Especially to be commended is the last part of the latter, where Quaker self-evaluating of worship is reported. * * * According to the minutes of the German Yearly Meeting, 1965, documents have been found recently from the "18th and 19th Century Quakers in Friedensthal and Minden, the Quaker burial ground, the old Quaker House, as well as the official Quaker records of births, marriages and deaths." Wilhelm Rasche reported orally on these, and also in Der Quäker, July 1965 (XXXIX, No. 7, pp. 189 f.) he has published a brief summary of the records of burials in the graveyard at Bad Pyrmont. There were fifty-nine of them between 1793 and 1881, including nineteen children. * * * Under the title simply The Quakers, an article appeared in 1962 in the Roman Catholic periodical Homiletic and Pastoral Review, pp. 883-594. The author, Charles Dollen, library director at the University of San Diego, writes on three Quaker pamphlets reprinted by Joseph Crukshank in 1770 at Philadelphia, presumably bound together and sold by Benjamin Ferris of Wilmington, Delaware, in a volume lately acquired by his library. They are Barclay's Anarchy ofthe Ranters, Perm's Rise and Progress, and Joseph Pike's Epistle to the National Meeting. Father Dollen describes each, reprinting the title page, and expands on Barclay's description of Catholicism and criticism of its errors. He argues the futility of trying to find religious authority outside the Church, but at the end he admits that both sides in the seventeenth century did not know each other's position well and that modern Catholics, in the more eirenic spirit of the ecumenical reunion, 58 Briefer Notices59 could improve the techniques of their forbears. So, we may add, can modern Quakers. * * * Margaret Barton Korty's article on "Benjamin Franklin and EighteenthCentury American Libraries" in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (N. S., Vol. LV, Part 9, 196,5, 83 pages) shows the amazing scope of Franklin's bibliothecal interest and has several evidences of his co-operation here as in other matters with Friends on both sides of the Atlantic; for example, James Logan in Philadelphia and his heirs, and in England, Peter Collinson and Drs. John Fothergill and John Coakley Lettsom. See the good index.» * * The well-known fullness of the vital records kept by Friends meetings makes them immediately convenient for general studies of population. Thus D. E .C. Eversley has been able to "exploit," at least by sampling, what is perhaps a total of some 40,000 family lists for Quakers in Ireland between 1650 and 1850 to contribute to the international effort now in progress towards historical demography. A contribution to the colloquium held at Budapest in September is his mimeographed paper issued by the University of Birmingham (Series D, No. 3, Faculty of Commerce and Social Science). An interpretation for lay folk among Friends will be found in his article in The Friend, London, CXXIII (Oct. 29, 1965), 1303-1305. * * * The Story of Wrightsboro, 1768...