nting north, guided the mariner on uncharted
seas. The obscure inventor of gunpowder revolutionized the art of war
more than all the famous conquerors had done, and the polity of states
more than any of the renowned legislators of antiquity. The equally
obscure inventor of mechanical clocks--a great improvement on the {8}
older sand-glasses, water-glasses, and candles--made possible a new
precision and regularity of daily life, an untold economy of time and
effort.

[Sidenote: Printing]

But all other inventions yield to that of printing, the glory of John
Gutenberg of Mayence, one of those poor and in their own times obscure
geniuses who carry out to fulfilment a great idea at much sacrifice to
themselves. The demand for books had been on the increase for a long
time, and every effort was made to reproduce them as rapidly and
cheaply as possible by the hand of expert copyists, but the
applications of this method produced slight result. The introduction
of paper, in place of the older vellum or parchment, furnished one of
the indispensable pre-requisites to the multiplication of cheap
volumes. In the early fifteenth century, the art of the wood-cutter
and engraver had advanced sufficiently to allow some books to be
printed in this manner, _i.e._ from carved blocks. This was usually,
or at first, done only with books in which a small amount of text went
with a large amount of illustration. There are extant, for example,
six editions of the _Biblia Pauperum_, stamped by this method. It was
afterwards applied, chiefly in Holland, to a few other books for which
there was a large demand, the Latin grammar of Donatus, for example,
and a guide-book to Rome known as the _Mirabilia Urbis Romae_. But at
best this method was extremely unsatisfactory; the blocks soon wore
out, the text was blurred and difficult to read, the initial expense
was large.

The essential feature of Gutenberg's invention was therefore not, as
the name implies, printing, or impression, but typography, or the use
of type. The printer first had a letter cut in hard metal, this was
called the punch; with it he stamped a mould known as the {9} matrix in
which he was able to found a large number of exactly identical types of
metal, usually of lead.

These, set side by side in a case, for the first time made it possible
satisfactorily to print at reasonable cost a large number of copies of
the same text, and, when that was done, the types could be