70 THE WOMBAT. 



and there is little room to question their claim ; they had 

 bank notes rtnade of paper 2,000 years before the Christian 

 era, and these are made more interesting by their having been 

 made from the fibres of the mulberry-tree — the original wood 

 pulp. The precise period at which the manufacture of paper 

 was introduced into Europe appears to be a matter of un- 

 certainty. Paper mills worked by water power were in 

 operation in Tuscany at the beginning of the fourteenth 

 century, and at Nuremburg, in Germany, one was established 

 in 1390 by [Jlman Stromer, who also wrote the first work 

 ever published on the art of paper making. He seems to 

 have been afraid of the art becoming known, for all his 

 workers were compelled to take an oath that they would 

 neither teach anyone the art of paper making nor make it 

 on their own account. Two or three centuries later we find 

 the Dutch in like manner so extremely jealous in regard to 

 the manufacture of paper, as to prohibit the exportation of 

 moulds under no less a penalty than that of death. 



Paper, taking the description of a recent writer, is an 

 aqueous deposit of any vegetable fibre, radically different in its 

 structure from all bodies formerly used for writing upon, being 

 a highly artificial material", or what may be called a happy 

 combination of the mechanical and the chemical. 



The materials with which the paper maker works are 

 cotton, flax, hernp, Manilla jute, Esparto straw and wood. 

 The fibres of all these are chemically the same ; their 

 equivalents are 6 of carbon, 10 of hydrogen, and 5 of oxygen. 

 These proportions are constant, though the physical charac- 

 teristics may differ widely, each of them when examined by 

 the microscope showing its own peculiarities. In the early 

 days of paper making, rags of various kinds may be said to 

 have been used for the production of paper pulp. The 

 process of reducing rags to the condition of pulp was, till the 

 middle of last century, most tedious and laborious. The rags 

 were first cut and sorted and then soaked with water and put 

 up in heaps to ferment ; in this condition they remained from 

 five or six days to as many weeks, being turned over at 

 intervals to prevent overheating and to secure a uniform 

 result. The action developed in these heaps was a species of 

 fermentation, during which the glutinous constituents We're 

 changed in their nature, and made more easy of removal in 

 the after-stages. Crude though this process may seem, a 

 certain amount of skill and care had to be exercised, as if this 

 process were continued, after the destruction of the gluten and 

 fat, the cellulose or fibre would have shared the same fate. 

 A copious washing followed the " rotting," as it was called, 

 after which the process of pulping began in the following 

 manner : the implement employed was simply a mortar with 

 a tight-fitting pestle Or stamper worked in the same manner 

 as a fjuartz battery ; a charge of rags for one of these mortars 



