SCIENCE IN THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD 



able for certain purposes. The popularity of this kind 

 of engraving was greatly increased by the interest taken 

 in the process by some of the great painters, particu- 

 larly those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In 

 this process such artists as Diirer, Rubens, and Raphael 

 saw the possibility of multiplying and distributing a 

 great number of copies of their paintings and drawings, 

 and giving them a wide circulation all over the world. 

 It also offered a means of preserving reasonably accurate 

 representations of their work which might otherwise 

 be accidentally destroyed and lost, or, being sold and 

 removed to some distant city, would be lost to the artist 

 except as a vague memory. For this and other reasons 

 all the artists of that period encouraged the line en- 

 graver, some of them being skilled in the actual technic 

 of the engraving-process itself. 



Most of the great painters, however, confined their 

 efforts to directing the work of the engraver rather than 

 to undertaking the tedious task of cutting the metals 

 themselves. For this work, like the work of the wood- 

 engraver, was done with a pointed chisel, or sharp tool, 

 called a "burin," and each line to be reproduced repre- 

 sented a corresponding gouging-out of metal with this 

 implement by manual labor. 



In the nineteenth century, steel-engraving for repro- 

 ducing pictures very generally supplanted copper-en- 

 graving; but both of these methods of reproducing 

 have gone out of use except in certain cases where, 

 in special editions of books or pictures, the publisher 

 finds it advantageous to revive this practically obsolete 

 form of illustration. 



