Now, by way of comment on D’Israeli, we will say that “it is very curious,” and moreover very strange, if not ridiculous, that he and Astle, (from whom he copies without a full and fair acknowledgment,) while “deeply complaining of the inferiority of our inks to those of antiquity,” have utterly failed to ascertain the cause or even to notice the occasion of it. They, as well as other writers on the subject, observe the excellence of the ink employed in manuscripts of earlier ages, down to the twelfth century, and the inferiority of the ink used from that period down to the close of the seventeenth century, without turning attention to the great historical fact that the FIRST PAPER-MILL in Europe was established in that same twelfth century.
A peculiar CACHEXY (a variety of the disease known to psycho-nosologists as the cacoëthes scribendi,) seems to be hereditary in the D’Israeli family. Benjamin D’Israeli, (the son of Isaac,) late Chancellor of the Exchequer, &c., when he rose in his place, as the Head or Representative of Her Majesty’s government in the House of Commons, to pronounce a eulogy on the recently deceased Duke of Wellington, had the impudence to repeat, word for word, a very bald translation of the éloge delivered by Lamartine a few years previous, on occasion of the death of one of the third-rate marshals of Napoleon I.
The D’Israeli family are evidently “some” of the children of Israel, who, (as we are told on good authority,) when they left Egypt borrowed everything they could get, and never, so far as the record shows, either returned the articles so obtained, or made proper acknowledgments therefor.
The Chinese did manufacture paper from the bark of the small branches of a tree of the mulberry genus, (Morus Multicaulis?) and also from old rags, silk, hemp, and cotton, as early as the second century of the Christian era; and it is supposed that from them the Arabs derived their knowledge of paper-making, an art which they introduced into Europe in the former half of the twelfth century, when the first paper-mill was put in operation in Spain, then under the Moorish dominion; and, in 1150, this article, as manufactured by them, had become famous throughout Christendom.
[We use the words Arab and Moor indiscriminately here. The former is the name of the race; the latter is limited to that portion found in Northern Africa. The Moor is the Arab of the West, (Al Mogreb, El Gharb,) in the Arabic, denominated Mogrebyn,—a word which in Roman and European mouths has smoothed and softened itself into a form suggestive of the origin of Maurus and Mauritania.]
Now, without coming to a positive conclusion on this subject, we feel authorized to pronounce what appears to be a reasonable opinion, derived from all the facts which we have just placed before the reader,—that the introduction of writing-paper among Europeans, was the occasion and cause of the invention and general employment of modern writing-ink by them.
The fact that the vegetable astringents form a deep or bluish black color, when combined with a salt of iron, had been known from time immemorial. Among the Romans, the atramentum sutorium,—“shoemaker’s ink,”—was applied to a solution of sulphate of iron employed by them, as it is even to this day, by workers in leather, to blacken the surface of that material. This it does by uniting chemically with the tannin and gallic acid, by which the hide was converted into leather, whose blackened particles are therefore essentially identical with modern ink. The “copperas-water” is to be found in every shoemaker’s shop, where it is used to color the cut edges of the heels and the rest of the soles.
As soon as the difficulty of writing with convenience and rapidity on paper, with the ancient carbonaceous ink, became manifest, the resort to the atramentum sutorium as a substitute for the atramentum scriptorium, was a matter of course, and was but a simple adaptation of a familiar substance to a new purpose, requiring no great ingenuity, and no invention whatever.
For a time, perhaps through a period of several centuries, a mixture of the two kinds of ink was employed by the Romans; and this was undoubtedly the best composition that was ever invented for the purpose of deliberate, careful, elegant writing, designed and required to be permanent and unchangeable under constant exposure and handling,—as in the case of manuscript books before the art of printing was known. Even as early as the first century of the Christian era, in the time of Pliny the Younger, and probably long before that, a solution of sulphate of iron was commonly or frequently added to the carbonaceous and oleaginous mixture which we have described as the original writing-ink. In short, the atramentum sutorium was added, in moderate quantity, to the atramentum scriptorium, thus constituting it a CHEMICAL as well as a MECHANICAL ink. So, modern ink may be improved in blackness, durability and beauty, and rendered unchangeable in color under the action of the chlorides, acids, &c., by the intermixture of a small quantity of the very finest carbon, in the form of an impalpable powder. But, the great difficulty is—that the carbon clogs the pen, and renders the ink too thick to flow easily, so that it can never be used for rapid or ordinary writing. We can not give, in our own words, a better account of this matter than we find in the language of a very learned author in the Edinburgh Review, (volume 48, Dec. 1828).
The article here cited is entitled “The Recovery of Lost Writings,” and is nominally a review of [1]Gaii Institutionum Commentarii: [2]Institutes de Gaius, recemment decouvertes dans un Palimpseste de la Bibliotheque de Chapitre de Verone. [3]Jurisconsulti Ante-Justinianei reliquiae ineditae, ex codice rescripto Bibliothecae Vaticanae, curante Angelo Maio, Bibliothecae ejusdem Praefecti. The article begins on page 348 of this volume of the Review.