ON THE PAPER MANUFACTURE. 387 



paper was made in the memory of our fathers,"' and expresses his "pity 

 the making thereof is disused." It will be remembered that Fuller 

 wrote during the first half of the seventeenth century, and as his labours 

 were nearly contemporaneous with the first establishment of paper- 

 making in this country, it may be interesting to note his remarks on the 

 various kinds of paper then in use. He says : — " There are almost as 

 many several kinds of paper as conditions of persons betwixt the Em- 

 peror and beggar : Imperial, Royal, Cardinal, and so downwards to that 

 coarse paper called emporetica, useful only for chapmen to wrap their 

 wares therein. Paper participates in some sort of the character of the 

 countrymen which make it : the Venetian being neat, subtle, and court 

 like ; the French, light, slight, and slender ; the Dutch, thick, corpulent, 

 and gross, not to say sometimes also charta bibula, sucking up the ink 

 with the sponginess thereof." 



. It is not our purpose in this place to describe in detail the process of 

 paper-making as at present practised. The route of the rags, from the 

 rag-loft to the salle, has been repeatedly traversed by different encyclo- 

 paedists, and is withal so simple, regarded as a generality, as to come 

 within the easy comprehension of almost any reader. It is only within 

 the last thirty years that paper-making has literally become an art. In 

 the days when all paper was made by hand, and the vatman, or, as the 

 word is still pronounced, "fateman," was the principal skilled hand in 

 the establishment, paper-making was comparatively a very simple 

 operation. Rags were not then the skeleton in the closet which every 

 paper-maker now-a-days is supposed to possess. The limited supply of 

 skilled labour regulated the number of vats, and the size of the moulds 

 the size of the sheet ; and it was not until nearly twenty-five years after 

 the existence of the paper machine was known in this country — viz., 

 June 17th, 1825 — that a Bill was introduced and passed the Legislature 

 abolishing the Act by which newspapers were limited in the size of their 

 sheet to 32 inches by 22. Vat-made papers have hitherto been consi- 

 dered to be, without exception, stronger than machine-made paper, 

 owing to the freedom with which the sheet can contract in the process 

 of air-drying. Of this advantage, however, it is nearly deprived by the 

 introduction of hot-air driers on some modern machines. Some descrip- 

 tions of paper continue necessarily to be made by hand, such as bank 

 note, fine drawing, &c. ; but for all ordinary sorts, the " fateman " and 

 his moulds, the coucher and his felts, the drier and his tribbles, have 

 had to bow before that splendid aggregation of machines known as the 

 paper machine. 



The paper machine was invented by M. Louis Robert, in the year 

 1799. The MM. Didot, at that time the proprietors of the paper works 

 at Essonne, procured an interest in the patent, and they — through a 

 relation, Mr. Gamble — brought the invention under the notice of the 

 English paper-makers. The idea was to make a continuous sheet of 

 paper on an endless wire, couch it between rollers, and wind the sheet 



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