SCIENCE IN THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD 



Hebrew imagination has pictured in connection with 

 the fall of the famous city. Neither was there a King 

 Belshazzar in Babylon at this, or at any other time. 

 King Nabonidus, however, had a son named Belshazzar 

 who probably served in the army and whom the Hebrews 

 probably confused with his father, as they also con- 

 fused the capture of Babylon by Cyrus with its subse- 

 quent capture by Darius. The oriental mind was, and 

 is, curiously defective in its conceptions of the neces- 

 sities of exact history. 



THE PALM-LEAF BOOKS OF THE HINDUS 



The examples of the Egyptians and Babylonians il- 

 lustrate the fact that the material selected for book- 

 making depends upon natural conditions of the environ- 

 ment. So when we go still farther to the East, it is not 

 surprising that we find the knowledge of the Hindus 

 recorded on books of a quite novel character. The 

 type here is a peculiar form of palm leaf, two or three 

 inches in width, cut in sections of a convenient length, 

 say from one to two feet. Such strips of palm leaf 

 afford a convenient surface for receiving the writing, 

 and they have the merit of requiring no preliminary 

 treatment beyond mere drying. Each strip is comparable 

 to the leaf of a book, the writing, as usual, being placed 

 upon it longitudinally. The leaves are then piled 

 upon one another in sequence. Sometimes they were 

 perforated at each end and strung together like Vene- 

 tian blinds. 



This principle of long, relatively narrow leaves, in- 

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