THE AMERICAN WOOD-PAPER COMPANY. 479 
seen. Their erection cost half a million dollars, and the investment in 
them and the paper mills worked in connection with them is over a 
million. At the Flat Rock Mills there are straw pulp works, of a capa- 
city to produce daily from seven to eight thousand pounds of straw pulp, 
a certain proportion of which it is found advantageous to mix with the 
wood pulp. The daily production of paper from these wood and straw 
pulp works and the paper mills run in connection with them will be 
fully thirty thousand pounds. 
When the good German Guttenberg arranged his device of printing 
he little knew all that his contrivance was doomed to effect. In the 
olden times we made our paper deliberately — giving great time to each 
single sheet — and furnishing the monks and the palimpsest makers with 
heavy gray sheets from papyrus, and smooth and well-polished parch- 
ment or vellum. No writing of editorials in those dear old days, when 
Father Francis gave his life to one book, prayerfully, protesting, much 
abounding in virgins and saints and very long epistles. Monks and 
vellums have long gone to the worms or to the cheerful torch of the 
iconoclast, who made sad havoc in that anti-morning newspaper period 
of mankind. Those who wrote found sufficient supply in the sheep and 
the bulrush ; and so we might have gone on in our condition of blissful 
ignorance if the quick-witted German had not placed his inky stamps 
upon paper and created a new world out of the chaos of manuscripts, 
and vellums, and scrawls long since gone to dust — let us thank heaven 
— and doing duty as fertilising loam. 
But men must print and men must read, and the sheep was scarce, 
and the Egyptian bulrush passed its day of proht,and Nature was placed 
under contribution to give food to this insatiate Printing Press. Oh, 
wise Jack Cade ! " Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth 
of the realm in erecting a grammar-school ; and, whereas, before, our 
forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast 
caused printing to be used ; and, contrary to the King, his crown and 
dignity, hast built a paper-mill." For which he was beheaded, thanks 
to my Lord Mortimer ! China took her rice straw and the inner bark of 
trees to print the sayings of Confucius. Japan took the mulberry tree, and 
made a thin, silky paper, of good texture, delicate, and inviting — good, 
I should think, for love sonnets. In Spain, linen was used as early as 
1178. Great scribblers, those Spanish monks, as Mr. Prescott and other 
historians found to their sorrow ! Over a hundred years ago Germany 
exhausted rags and was forced to try straw, but with little success. 
Twenty years later France succeeded in making paper out of linden- 
wood, but the experiment was not pursued. Those Frenchmen eighty 
years ago had more bloody notions in their heads than making paper ! 
Altogether our ancestors must have been as sorely pressed for paper as 
we who claim to be of the Age of Gab and Scribble. It is on record 
that in 1772 there were sixty varieties of paper made from sixty different 
