Great Seal of the United States the crest, he used Hopkinson's constellation of thirteen stars. The motto was "E Pluribus Unum", taken from the first committee, and was on a scroll held in the eagle's beak. An eagle holding symbols of war and peace has a long history, and also echoed the second committee's themes. Franklin owned a 1702 [[emblem book]], which included an eagle with olive branch and arrows near its talons, which may have been a source for Thomson. The arrows also mirror those in the arms of the [[Dutch Republic]], the only country in Europe with a representative government at the time, which
Great Seal of the United States current die is the seventh, and was made in 1986. [[File:US Dorsett seal.jpg|thumb|Dorsett seal, reversed photography]] In 1894 Palemon Howard Dorsett, a lifelong Department of Agriculture employee, turned up at the Department of State with a metal die engraved with the Great Seal, claiming it had originally been given to his family by a nephew of [[George Washington]]. It was examined by [[Gaillard Hunt]], the author of a pamphlet on the Great Seal, who agreed that it appeared to be contemporaneous with the original 1782 seal, but he took no further interest in the matter. Decades later, in 1936, Dorsett