nized channels of commerce the art reached Asia Minor, where
paper was made of cotton reduced to pulp and boiled. Parchment had
become so extremely dear that a cheap substitute was discovered in an
imitation of the cotton paper known in the East as _charta bombycina_.
The imitation, made from rags, was first made at Basel, in 1170, by a
colony of Greek refugees, according to some authorities; or at Padua,
in 1301, by an Italian named Pax, according to others. In these ways
the manufacture of paper was perfected slowly and in obscurity; but this
much is certain, that so early as the reign of Charles VI., paper pulp
for playing-cards was made in Paris.

When those immortals, Faust, Coster, and Gutenberg, invented the Book,
craftsmen as obscure as many a great artist of those times appropriated
paper to the uses of typography. In the fifteenth century, that naive
and vigorous age, names were given to the various formats as well as to
the different sizes of type, names that bear the impress of the naivete
of the times; and the various sheets came to be known by the different
watermarks on their centres; the grapes, the figure of our Saviour, the
crown, the shield, or the flower-pot, just as at a later day, the eagle
of Napoleon's time gave the name to the "double-eagle" size. And in the
same way the types were called Cicero, Saint-Augustine, and Canon
type, because they were first used to print the treatises of Cicero and
theological and liturgical works. Italics are so called because they
were invented in Italy by Aldus of Venice.

Before the invention of machine-made paper, which can be woven in any
length, the largest sized sheets were the _grand jesus_ and the double
columbier (this last being scarcely used now except for atlases or
engravings), and the size of paper for printers' use was determined
by the dimensions of the impression-stone. When David explained these
things to Eve, web-paper was almost undreamed of in France, although,
about 1799, Denis Robert d'Essonne had invented a machine for turning
out a ribbon of paper, and Didot-Saint-Leger had since tried to perfect
it. The vellum paper invented by Ambroise Didot only dates back as far
as 1780.

This bird's eye view of the history of the invention shows incontestably
that great industrial and intellectual advances are made exceedingly
slowly, and little by little, even as Nature herself proceeds. Perhaps
articulate speech and the art of writing were graduall