The Republic of Letters in the American Colonies: Francis Daniel Pastorius Makes a Notebook

FRANCIS DANIEL PASTORIUS LOVED to make jokes.1 Once he had made them, he tried to preserve them—even at the cost of defacing the beloved books in his library. Among his favorite writers was the Leiden University historian Georg Horn (1620– 1670), who attracted attention in the 1650s and 1660s for his polemical works on the origins of the American peoples and his surveys of European history and politics.2 In 1666 Horn brought out a typically short textbook on a typically big subject, the history of nature and God’s relation to it. He gave it the catchy title Arca Mosis, sive Historia mundi [The Ark of Moses, or the History of the World]. The engraved title page depicts Pharaoh’s daughter as she discovers the infant Moses. Turning toward a bare-bellied companion while her servingwomen watch, she holds the baby up in what the British still call a Moses basket. A small, grumpy-looking crocodile walks toward her, its intentions unclear. Pastorius’s copy of the 1669 edition, like a number of his other books, is in the Library Company of Philadelphia.3 Writing in a sinuous