subjected the collection of Caspar Weiss, his father, to a rearrangement and added more than 500 hymns of Schwenkfelder authorship. It is also noteworthy that this activity did not cease with the emigration of the sect from the Fatherland. The present writer has thus far examined six folios besides numerous quartos and a great variety of additional collections arranged for church use, all of which were compiled or transcribed in America. The extant manuscript hymn-books arranged for household use (Taegliche Gesangbuecher) are also numerous. It has been the writer's good fortune to unearth a number of important collections of hymns in manuscript and it is not unlikely that others exist which will yet be discovered. We should, therefore, not lose sight of the fact that the great mass of transcriptions—of hymns, of sermons, of historical matter and of other literature—produced by the Schwenkfelders in America represents the survival of the laborious work of transcribing which originated in Europe more than two hundred years before, when printers were forbidden to do press-work for the Schwenkfelders. Necessity was the mother of the device, and in this way for a period of more than two centuries preceding the emigration to America, copies of the Schwenkfeld prints which had been saved from seizure were multiplied, and both their earlier and their contemporaneous literature preserved.
Investigation has revealed the further fact that three collections of hymns served as the principal manuscript sources of the Schwenkf elder hymn-book of 1762, familiarly known as the "Saur edition." The collections in question form a connected series, beginning with the compilation of Caspar Weiss, which was completed in 1709. Hence, the first Schwenkf elder hymn- book printed in America was in part the result of a line of activity in the compiling of hymns, which began at the very opening of the 18th century, about 60 years before. The additional fact has also been disclosed that this continued activity is marked from its beginning to its close by a well-defined progression,—each compiler after the originator, having operated with the completed
