rl came into use to supplant the old inking balls.
Later in the century (there is no need to go into specific detail here)
calendered and coated papers were introduced, and wood engraving on
these glossy papers became a medium that could reproduce wash drawings,
crayon drawings, pencil drawings, and oil paintings so faithfully that
all the original textures were apparent.[30] The engraver, concerned
entirely with accurate reproduction, became little more than a mechanic
who rendered pictures drawn on the blocks by an artist. In time,
photographic processes came to be used for transferring pictures to the
blocks and eventually, of course, photomechanical halftones replaced the
wood engraver altogether.

[Illustration: Figure 14.--Title-Page Illustration by Thomas Bewick,
from _History of British birds_, vol. 1, 1797. (Actual size.)]

[30] The electrotyping process, which came into prominence in 1839
through the experiments of Professor Jacobi in St. Petersburg and Jordan
and Spencer in England, had made it possible to produce substitute
plates of the highest fidelity. For fine work, these were much superior
to stereotyping.

Bewick was an artist, not a reproductive craftsman. His blocks were
conceived as original engravings, not as imitations of tones and
textures created in another medium. If wood engraving advanced in the
direction of commercialism to fill an overwhelming mass need, it was
only because he had given it a technical basis. But it had greater
artistic potentialities, as proved by Blake, Calvert, and Lepere, among
others, and has found new life in the engravers of the 20th-century
revival.

The reasons for Bewick's remarkable effectiveness can now be summed up.
He succeeded, first, because he was the natural inheritor of a
specifically English graphic arts process, burin-engraving on the end
grain of wood. This had been practiced almost solely in England, which
lacked a woodcut tradition, for about 75 years before the date he
finished his apprenticeship. We know from Jackson's contemporary account
that end-grain wood engraving was standard practice in England from
about 1700. Bewick merely continued and refined a medium that came down
to him as a national tradition.

Secondly, his country isolation and lack of academic training saved him
from the inanity of repeating the old decorative devices--trophies,
cartouches, classical figures, Roman ruins, and other international
conventions that had lost thei