THE BOX. 75 



of at a time, which are cut off the living tree as they are 

 wanted. Boxes, &c., formed of the trunk are easily 

 distinguished from those made of the root, the former 

 always displaying a beautiful and very regular star, which 

 is never the case with the latter." 1 



Box is the hardest and heaviest of all European woods, 

 the only one among them that will sink in water, or that 

 is sold by weight. By far the most important use to 

 which Box-wood is applied is as a material for wood- 

 engraving, an art which has now attained such perfection, 

 and is in such great request for the illustration of books, 

 that it may not be uninteresting if I here introduce a 

 short sketch of its history. 



A method of multiplying copies of a pattern by means 

 of a stamp was known to the ancient Babylonians, as may 

 be proved by an examination of some bricks brought from 

 the site of the city of Babylon, and preserved in the 

 British Museum. These bear in them characters evidently 

 produced by pressure from a wooden block while the clay 

 was in a soft state. At a later period, the Chinese and 

 Indians were accustomed to print on paper, cotton, and 

 silk (though it does not appear that they had carried the 

 art to such perfection as to delineate figures), long before 

 the custom was practised in Europe. In the thirteenth 

 and fourteenth centuries, when writing was an accomplish- 

 ment confined to the learned, a wooden stamp was used in 

 the place of a sign-manual for attesting 

 written documents ; and in the fifteenth 

 century, or perhaps earlier, the art was 

 applied to stamping figures on playing 

 cards. If the earliest cards bore de- 

 signs at all resembling the grotesque 

 figures on modern specimens, wood-engraving was as yet 

 very far from having any pretension to be considered one 

 of the fine arts, or in the least degree connected with them. 

 Most probably the latter are exact copies, for so utterly 



1 Loudon. 

 E 2 



