424 PROFESSOR TRAILL ON THE COMPOSITION OF A NEW WRITING-INK. 



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tured from what he terms painters' black, the soot collected in glass furnaces, rub- 

 bed up with gum, animal glue, and sulphate of iron {x"-X7Mv6oi). 



I find the antique inks of the Herculaneum and Egyptian papyri to resist 

 chlorine, acids, and other agents which efface metallic inks. The characters also 

 so often found on unwrought fragments of limestone, in the tombs of Upper 

 Egypt, are written with a carbonaceous ink. These fragments appear to have 

 been employed, just as we should a scrap of paper, to receive an impromptu com- 

 position. 



These inks have resisted the ordinary effects of time exceedingly well ; but 

 they have the disadvantage of being removable by water ; and they are not so well 

 adapted for writing in a current hand (the great desideratum in modern practice) 

 as for the slower process of the ancients. The introduction of paper instead of 

 parchment and papyrus, probably contributed to the general employment of me- 

 tallic inks ; as those containing the salts of iron not only flowed readily from the 

 pen on paper, but struck sufficiently into that material to prevent the easy ablu- 

 tion of the writing. But metallic inks, however convenient in other respects, are 

 inferior to those with a base of carbon in resisting the effects of time, and still 

 more in withstanding deletion by chemical means. 



Carbonaceous inks appear to have been generally employed till about the 

 middle of the fourteenth century. The high price of manuscripts rendered copy- 

 ists careful in the choice of then- inks ; and probably it was not until the intro- 

 duction of printing that they fell into disuse among copyists. Blagden, however, 

 mentions having found a manuscript of the ninth century written with an ink 

 composed of iron with a vegetable astringent (Phil. Trans, for 1787) ; but, after 

 having examined a great many manuscripts of the thirteenth, and early part of 

 the fourteenth, centuries, I found them chiefly ^vritten with carbonaceous inks, 

 resisting all the ordinary deleting agents. After the middle of the fourteenth 

 century, however, the carbonaceous inks begin to disappear, and manuscripts are 

 written with compositions very similar to om- ordinary writing-inks. This was 

 attended with small inconvenience, except the gradual fading of their colour, 

 until the discovery of the properties of chlorine ; and of late years their imper- 

 fections have been generally admitted. 



Series VII. Carbon ivith Gums, Gum-resins. 



1. I attempted to form a durable ink by incorporating carbon with gunis 

 and gum-resins ; but they took little hold of the paper, and readily washed oft' 

 when moistened. The well-known Chinese ink is a beautiful mixture of carbona- 

 ceous matter with glue, which we try to imitate in Europe, but uniformly fail to 

 equal.* It is, however, destitute of some of the essential quahties of a good 



* In Annales de Chimie for 1833, vol. liii., is a curious account of the Chinese method of making 

 ink, extracted from a Japanese Encyclopaedia in 80 octavo volumes, and from a Chinese Dictionary of 



