CH. viii. INVENTION OF PRINTING. 55 



tion of the compass, we must pause a moment to notice 

 another great change which took place in Europe about 

 a hundred years after the time of Bacon and Gioja. 

 This was the invention of printing. 1 In the early part 

 of the fifteenth century some people began to engrave, that 

 is, to cut on wood, pictures and texts of Scripture, and then 

 to rub them over with ink, and take an impression of them 

 on paper. One day it occurred to a man named John 

 Gutenberg, of Strasburg, that if the letters of a text could 

 be made each one separate, they might be used over and 

 over again. He began to try to make such letters, and 

 with the help of John Faust of Mayence, and Peter Schoeffer 

 of Gernsheim, both of them working mechanics like himself, 

 he succeeded in making metal letters, or types as they are 

 called. These men finished printing the first Bible in the 

 year 1455. In 1465 the first printing-press was started in 

 Italy, and another in Paris in 1469, while Caxton introduced 

 printing into England in 1474. 



This invention was a great step towards new knowledge. 

 So long as people were obliged to write out copies of every 

 work, new books could only spread very slowly, and old 

 books were very dear and rare ; but as soon as hundreds 

 of copies could be printed off and sold in one year, the 

 works of the Greeks on science were collected and published 

 by clever men, and were much more read than before ; and 

 what was still more important, books about new discoveries 

 passed quickly from one country to another, and those who 

 were studying new truths were able to learn what other 

 scientific men were also doing. Thus printing was one of 

 the chief steps out of the ignorance of the Dark Ages. 

 Voyages round the World. The next step, as I said 

 1 The art of printing appears to have been practised by the Chinese 

 as early as the beginning of the eighth century. 



