no means so inconspicuous as that which the most of us are apt to assign to him. Every one is willing to admit that to him is due much of the material prosperity for which this State is no noted, that his hogs are fat, his butter is sweet, his lands are well tilled, and his barns are capacious; but the claim that there is anything distinguished in his origin, or brilliant in his career, is seldom made, and that he has approached his English associates in knowledge of politics, literature, or science those of us who get our Saxon blood by way of the Mersey and the Thames would quickly deny. The facts which tell in his favor, however, are many and striking. Pastorius possessed probably more literary attainments, and produced more literary work than any other of the early emigrants to this province, and he alone, of them all, through the appreciative delineation of a New England poet, has a permanent place in the literature of our own time. Willem Rittinghuysen, in 1690, built on a branch of the Wissahickon Creek the first paper-mill in the Colonies.[1] The Bible was printed in German in America thirty-nine years before it appeared in English, and in the preface to his third edition in 1776, Saur was still able to say, “to the honor of the German people — for no other nation can assert that it has ever been printed in their language in this part of the world.”[2]
- ↑ Jones's notes to Thomas's History of Printing, vol. i. p. 21.
- ↑ The lack of knowledge concerning the Germans amounts at times almost to obtuseness. Dr. William Smith wrote in 1753 a letter, recently printed, in which he said they were in danger of “sinking into barbarian ignorance,” while in another sentence he complained with the utmost naiveté that “they import many foreign books, and in Penna. have their printing houses and their newspapers.” The editor of the Magazine of American History lately gave space to a controversy as to whether Collin's Bible or Thomas's Bible, both printed in 1791, was the “First great Quarto Bible in America,” apparently unaware that Saur was a half century earlier.
