52QUAKER HISTORY family correspondence, mainly with his brothers in Lancashire and Yorkshire, offering glimpses of the spiritual bonds which drew this family together and the psychological tensions which tore it apart; (2) medical and scientific correspondence, including a number of interesting letters to John and William Bartram, who collected American specimens for Dr. Fothergill; and (3) Anglo-American Quaker correspondence, mainly with Israel and James Pemberton, full of comment on Pennsylvania politics in the 1740's and 1750's and on the revolutionary crisis in the 1760's and 1770's. This edition has some shortcomings. The editors have assembled nearly four hundred Fothergill letters, but do not bother to calendar, or even list, the many documents which they chose not to print. Their annotations are much more satisfying in matters medical than in matters political, and they have made some unfortunate errors, as when Dr. Fothergill's alarm at Pontiac's Rebellion in 1763 (p. 231) is misidentified as concern about the Six Nations. The editors seem oblivious to their hero's exposed position as a rich and fashionable figure in a time of Quaker moral crisis. Yet their mode of presentation conveys the good doctor's deep and abiding interest in America, a land he never visited. In the 1750's Dr. Fothergill urged the Quaker leaders in Pennsylvania to moderate their quarrel with the proprietary family, and he took a leading role in persuading them to withdraw from the Assembly during the French and Indian War. "You are unfit for government," he wrote in 1756. "You owe the people protection and yet withhold them from protecting themselves." A decade later he again deplored the violence of colonial resistance to the Stamp Act; Americans he defined as "warm, passionate and an Englishman in excess." But when the revolutionary crisis deepened, Fothergill concluded that the Americans were right to resist, and in 1775 he warned his Pennsylvania Quaker friends that the king was trying to reduce them to slavery, and they should do nothing to obstruct America's fight for liberty. Fothergill had long been a friend of Benjamin Franklin. In 1751 he supervised the London publication of Franklin's tract on electricity. In 1775 he helped Franklin negotiate (unsuccessfully) with the king's ministers. In 1780 he wrote his last extant letter to Franklin in France, saluting him as the ambassador of "a state the most promising of any that ever inhabited any part of this globe." No wonder, then, when Franklin learned a few months later of Fothergill's death, he mourned his old friend: "I think a worthier man never lived. For besides his constant readiness to serve his Friends, he was always projecting something for the Good of his Country and of Mankind in general . . . much more than can now be ever known, his Modesty being equal to his other Virtues." University of PennsylvaniaRichard S. Dunn Mennonite Attire Through Four Centuries. By Melvin Gingerich. Breinigsville , Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania German Society. 1970. Publications of the Pennsylvania German Society, IV (1970). xxiii, 192 pages, index. The question of dress has agitated the Pennsylvania German "plain" sects BOOK REVIEWS53 at many times and places throughout their history. We are fortunate that the Pennsylvania German Society has made available for scholars and the general reader the conclusions on Mennonite costume history by Dr. Melvin Gingerich, longtime editor of the Mennonite Quarterly Review and Director of the Archives of the Mennonite Church. The dress question in the long run was much die same for Mennonites as for Quakers, but it has had a different time schedule in the two groups. The dilemma produced by insistence upon both outward forms and positive inward ideals led Quakers to drop separatistic "plainness" largely by the end of the nineteenth century, at just the same time when Mennonites were beginning to regulate plainness into a kind of "uniform dress." Pennsylvania 's Mennonites, with their Anabaptist roots, have always had a more negative attitude to the "world" than the Quakers, whose more positive stance in relation to both state and society is due to their Puritan roots. Hence Mennonites have preserved separatism and maintained the outward symbol of dress in opposition to the surrounding culture...