1872.] Paper at the International Exhibition. 467 
the end of the fifteenth century, scarcely any but wrapping- 
paper was made in this country before the Revolution, but 
the manufacture afterwards advanced so rapidly, that by 
1760 Britain was almost wholly independent of foreign 
supply. In that year James Whatman, who had learned the 
art of paper-making whilst travelling in the suite of the 
British ambassador to Holland, where the best papers were 
then made, established a paper factory at Maidstone. Not 
long before this wove moulds had been invented by Basker- 
ville, to obviate the usual roughness of laid paper. 
Paper was made entirely by hand until about the year 
1803, when M. Didot, a Frenchman, brought over to this 
country a model of a continuous machine, which was taken 
up by Messrs. Fourdrinier, at that time the principal sta- 
tioners and paper manufacturers in Great Britain, and it was 
' perfected and manufactured by Mr. Bryan Donkin, whose 
firm are, at the present day, the principal manufacturers 
of paper machinery in the United Kingdom. In 1809 Mr. 
Dickinson, a paper maker, invented another method of 
making endless paper; and in 1826 M. Canson, of Annonay, 
first applied suction-pumps to the Didot and Fourdrinier 
machines. 
The principle of paper-making machinery is simply this: 
instead of employing moulds and felts of limited dimensions, 
as was originally the practice, the peculiar merit of the in- 
vention consists in the adaptation of an endless wire gauze 
to receive the paper pulp, and again an endless felt, to 
which in progress the paper is transferred, and thus, 
by a marvellously delicate adjustment, while the wire at 
one end receives a constant flow of liquid pulp, in the 
course of two or three minutes there comes out at the other 
end of the machine a continuous length of paper carefully 
wound upon a roller. 
Having thus briefly recorded the history of paper manu- 
facture, we pass on now to a consideration of the different 
materials from which it is made; and, first of all, we will 
refer to the raw products, as shown in the International 
Exhibition. First of all, then, we must notice the cotton 
exhibits, as, so far as we at present know, it was from the 
raw cotton that paper was first manufactured, and, as has 
been already stated, this manufacture had its origin in 
China. 
Various specimens of the cotton plant are exhibited, 
growing in pots, with their cotton pods fully developed, in 
a separate building or cunservatory, called the ‘‘ Cotton- 
growing House,” in the west grounds of the Exhibition 
