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While arrangements were being made for showing us these details regarding paper-making, we visited the village church, which was very mean and bare; we were disappointed to find nothing suspicious in the way of muñecos. It was suggested that we should visit the oratorio, where we found more. Here they held their costumbre in June, or thereabouts.
This bird's eye view of the history of the invention shows incontestably that great industrial and intellectual advances are made exceedingly slowly, and little by little, even as Nature herself proceeds. Perhaps articulate speech and the art of writing were gradually developed in the same groping way as typography and paper-making.
The streets are full of book-stores, and one-half the business of the inhabitants appears to consist in printing, paper-making and binding. The publishers have a handsome exchange of their own, and during the fairs the amount of business transacted is enormous. At last in this "Florence of the Elbe," as the Saxons have christened it!
To enable our young readers who have never seen the process of paper-making to understand the change in our heroine's surroundings, we will tell them in a few words how paper is made. As, of course, is universally known, rags, straw, old rope, poplar pith, etc., are the materials used. The best writing-paper is made of linen rags, which are for the most part imported from Germany.
The first process in the paper-making did not require much nicety in its execution; and, moreover, it could be performed as well inside the hut as in the largest room of a paper-mill. All they had to do was to pick the bark to shreds.
Flax was an Egyptian plant; paper-making was an Egyptian trade; and Theophilus, a Roman writer on manufactures, when speaking of paper made from flax, clearly points to its Alexandrian origin, by giving it the name of Greek parchment. Between the papyrus of the third century, and the strong paper of the eleventh century, no books remain to us but those written on parchment.
The type, an imitation of what made the reputation of the little volumes of the Gryphes of Lyons, is charming, the printing is perfect, and the paper, which is French the development of paper-making in Holland and England did not take place till after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes is excellent.
An immense amount of this pulp is exported to England in sacks, and is used for many other purposes besides paper-making. Another thing which we get from Norway is ice. Most of those huge blocks of ice which you see in the fishmongers' shops in the summer have come across the North Sea, and ice-cutting is a very important business in the winter months.
From the Antwerp Exhibition proper I bear away nothing but an impression of a wonderful paper-making machine, at one end of which the paper enters as liquid pulp, to issue at the other as a solid sheet. A pity the process was not carried one step farther, to the printed newspaper stage so that what went in as rags should come out as mendacity.
The Abbe Grozier had a Chinese book, an iconographical and technological work, with a great many pictures in it, illustrating all the different processes of paper-making, and he showed us a picture of the workshop with the bamboo stalks lying in a heap in the corner; it was extremely well drawn.
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