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Such is the story, which the reader most likely knows very well; and having alluded to the origin of the art, we shall not follow the stream through its windings and enlargement after it issued from the little parent rock, or fill our pages with the rest of the pedigree. Senefelder invented Lithography.

This sort of amusement has exercised the skill of artists of all times, and engravings, and even paintings, of double aspect are very numerous. Chance has recently put into our hands a very curious work of this kind, which is due to a skillful artist named Gaillot. It is an album of quite ancient lithographs, which was published at Berlin by Senefelder.

Je vais cesser de vous ecrire mais non de vous regretter." Beatrice Merger. Fifty years ago there lived at Munich a poor fellow, by name Aloys Senefelder, who was in so little repute as an author and artist, that printers and engravers refused to publish his works at their own charges, and so set him upon some plan for doing without their aid.

Lithography, now an art of so much importance, was invented by the Bavarian, Senefelder. The art of painting on glass has also been revived. In music, the Germans have retained their ancient fame. After Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, etc., have gained immense celebrity as composers.

A born inventor, this Alois Senefelder, a genius, supported by boundless hope, immense capability for hard, laborious work, and an indomitable energy; he started with the plan of etching his writings in relief on metal plates, to take impressions therefrom by means of rollers.

Whoever he might be, he was certainly a great benefactor of his species. This is not, however, the case with most modern inventions, the greater number of which are more or less disputed. Who was entitled to the merit of inventing printing has never yet been determined. Weber and Senefelder both laid claim to the invention of lithography, though it was merely an old German art revived.

In China the art of printing is of great antiquity. Lithography was well known in Germany, by the very name which it still bears, nearly three hundred years before Senefelder reinvented it; and specimens of the ancient art are yet to be seen in the Royal Museum at Munich. Steam-locomotion by sea and land, had long been dreamt of and attempted.

The slabs of limestone which served Senefelder in a previous emergency were now recurred to by him as an absorbent material similar to paper, and a trial by making an impression from his above-mentioned paper matrix on the stone, and subsequent gumming, convinced him that he was correct in his surmise. By this act lithography became an established fact.