wide. It has thin wooden covers
and is, over all, an inch thick; but between these covers is a strip of
deerskin twenty-nine feet long and, of course, nearly five inches wide.
This is folded in screen or fan fashion, the first and last leaves being
pasted to the inside of the covers. This attachment is really the only
binding; the whole strip is capable of being opened up to its full
length. It is read--by those who can read its vividly colored
hieroglyphics--by holding it like a modern book, turning the leaves
until what seems the end is reached, and then turning the cover for the
next leaf, and continuing to turn until the first cover is reached
again, but from the other side. Incredible as it may seem, there is a
book of India which is almost identical in structure with the ancient
Mexican book. It has the shape of the palm-leaf book, but it is made of
heavy paper, blackened to be written on with a chalk pencil, and it
opens like a fan exactly in the Mexican fashion. Each cover is formed by
a double fold of paper, and the writing runs lengthwise of the page as
in the palm-leaf volume. As the writing can be erased, the book serves
the purpose of a slate.

The variety of objects that men have used to write upon almost surpasses
imagination, ranging from mountain walls to the ivory shoulders of Rider
Haggard's heroine in his "Mr. Meeson's Will." Such unusual, if actual,
writing materials belong, perhaps, rather to the penumbra than to the
background of the book; but, as a final survey of our subject, running
back to the time when there were no books and men must rely upon their
memories, we may quote what Lane says of the sources from which the
Kuran was derived after the death of Mohammed: "So Zeyd gathered the
Kuran from palm-leaves, skins, shoulder-blades (of beasts), stones, and
the hearts of men."

THE CHINESE BOOK

The naturalist, Lloyd Morgan, in one of his lectures threw together on
the screen pictures of a humming bird and an insect of the same size,
the two looking so much alike as to seem to the casual observer to
belong to the same order. Yet they are anatomically far more different
than the man and the fish. In much the same way we may be led to suppose
that a Chinese book and an occidental paper-bound book are much the same
thing in origin as they are to the eye. But here too the likeness is
only apparent. One book form has descended from a block of wood and the
other from a fold of silk.

The