the city of Alexandria was founded by the
Macedonian conqueror; but Pliny, who cites
Varro, also expresses a doubt that the invention
of paper was so recent, and tells, in
illustration of his doubt, an old story about
Numa Pompilius, on the authority of Cassius
Hemina, a very early Roman historian, of
whom only a few fragments now exist. It
appears that in the year one hundred and
eighty-two before Christ, a scribe named
Terentius, while digging up a field that
belonged to him on the Janiculum, found a
coffin which was deemed to be that of Kin
Numa, who had reigned about five hundred
and thirty years before. In this, were
discovered some books, made of paper, and
containing the doctrines of Pythagoras. They
were burned by the prætor Quintus Petilius,
on the singular ground that they were—
philosophical. Possibly this reason is somewhat
loosely stated; for there is another version of
the story, told by Varro, and cited by St.
Augustine, according to which the senate
ordered the books to be destroyed, because
they contained the causes of the religious
institutions founded by Numa, which were so
trivial, that they thought an exposure of
them would bring the national religion into
contempt. Moreover, by the act of destruction,
they complied with the will of the
deceased monarch. However, much as Pliny
is disposed to believe in the antiquity of
paper, an assertion made by the Consul
Mucianus, that while he was in Lycia, he read a
letter written on paper by the Homeric hero,
Sarpedon, staggers the natural historian
not a little; because Homer, when he tells
that wild tale of Bellerophon, in which the
young hero is sent to Lycia with a written
message that is to cause his destruction,
mentions the folding pinax or tablet, as the
instrument employed on the occasion. As
for the use of papyrus in Egypt itself,
manuscripts have been found by Champollion, the
age of which is estimated at three thousand
five hundred years. Probably the best
method of reconciling all seeming contradictions
is to assume that it was not until about
the time of Alexander the Great, that the use
of papyrus was generally known in Greece.

Pliny has left an account of the manner of
making paper from the papyrus, which has
caused no small controversy among the
learned, but which, with the aid of a little
conjecture, may be filled up into an
intelligible statement. The layers of skin formed
beneath the bark of the plant were, in the
first place, detached from each other in
strips by means of a sharp instrument. The
skins, finest at the centre, became coarser and
coarser as they approached the bark, and the
choice which was made of them, regulated
the quality of the paper. After the strips
had been carefully taken off, they were laid
length-wise upon a table, wetted with the
water of the Nile. They were then woven
together cross-wise, being still moistened
with the same liquid, which answered the
double purpose of cementing and bleaching.
The operation of pressing followed, and
uneven places were smoothed down with a
tooth or a shell.

Nothing can be more plain and intelligible
than all this; but, here a little disagreeable
circumstance intrudes itself upon us with
terrible force. One of the French
commentators, to whom we are indebted for the
admirable Paris edition of Pliny, disbelieves
altogether the sticky properties of Nile-water,
while M. Poiret, another savant, doubts the
capabilities of the papyrus for such a
manufacture as that described above, and thinks
that the popular plant has unfairly engrossed
the reputation belonging to some other
child of the Egyptian soil. We entreat our
readers to forget this paragraph as soon
as they can, for a firm belief that papyrus is
papyrus, is absolutely necessary for the unity
of our dissertation. Luckily the Italian
method of making paper is less obnoxious to
doubt. According to this method, a paste
made of fine meal and vinegar, or of crumb
of bread softened by boiling water, was the
cement employed, and the paper, when the
pieces had been pasted together, was beaten
out with a hammer. Manuscripts by Augustus
Cæsar, Cicero, and Virgil, upon paper thus
manufactured, were seen by Pliny.

We have already stated, that the fineness
of the skins or layers of the papyrus, increased
in proportion to their proximity to the centre.
On this account the paper made from the
inner skin was employed for sacerdotal
purposes, and was called hieratic, while the
article derived from the outside was merely
used for parcels. However so great were the
improvements in the days of the first
Roman Emperors, that the old hieratic paper
soon lost its prestige. The Egyptian priests
were so jealous of this finer article that they
would not sell it till it had been previously
written upon, but the Romans had a way of
washing out the writing, that, it seems,
rendered it better than before, for the
paper so washed bore the name of the
Emperor Augustus, and a second kind, that
of his wife Lucia, nothing higher than the
third rank being left for the once supreme
hieratic. The two kinds of imperial paper as
they were called were in their turn eclipsed by
another kind called Fannian, after the name of
Rhemmius Fannius Palæmon, a grammarian,
who founded a paper-factory in the reign of
the Emperor Claudius. The fault ascribed to
the Augustan paper was an unpleasant
transparency and an inability to bear a strong
pressure of the pen.

With all these improvements, paper was
far from becoming an exceedingly common
article among the ancients, and even the
more opulent laid in their stores with economy
and used it with caution. Cicero, in one of
his letters to his friend Atticus, offers him a
sum that he may buy paper, rather than