People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 March 1894 — Paper, Pens and Ink. [ARTICLE]

Paper, Pens and Ink.

Paper, as we learn from recent discoveries, was in use in Egypt as far back as 2300 B. C., and not merely, aa old Pliny thought, from the time of Alexander the Great. The ancients, it appears, knew more about pens and inks than they usually have credit for. The Greeks made silver and other metallic pens, and Latin manuscripts show a great variety of inks—red, purple, green, blue, silver and gold. The great Floreffe Bible in the British museum shows the skill of the penman in the twelfth century in the use ol this mode of decoration; and in somewhat later times it was no unusual thing for scribes to annotate their texts in colored inks —red, green, violet, blue —using each color for a distinct class of notes, historical, bio graphical, geographical, etc. Scientific works are often made exceedingly attractive by colored diagrams, chronologies by architectural arcades and ornamental panels. London Academy.