HERRING ON PAPER AND PAPERNARING...

TUE matter of this volume was originally delivered at the London - Institution' as lectures on substances used for writing upon, and the art of adapting them to that purpose, both in ancient and modern times. The author's family, if not himself, is closely connected with the paper trade ; • and the lectures oombine the qualities which might be looked for from the union of liberal eu- molly and practical knowledge. They also exhibit a neatness of 'style that indicates some literary training. Of the three chapters of which the -volume consists, the first is devoted to the -history of "the subject. It briefly describes the different substances—skins, 'papyrus, bark, leaves—used for writing upon by the ancients and Oriental peoples; as briefly investigates the discovery of the art of making paper from cotton or flax (linen); landing in the conclusion that we do notknow when where, or how the art was discovered, but that it was most probably a Chinese invention, imported into Europe by Eastern travellers or traders. Popular opinion ascribes -the introduction of the mannfacture into this country to Sir John • Spielman, who set up a mill at Dartford in 1588. Paper, however; was made in England at least a century earlier ; the authority being better than that of sack Cade in his charge against Lord Say- " thou hast built a paperinili." '

"The earliest trace of the manufacture in this country occurs in a book

printed by Caxton, about the year 1490, in which it isasaid of Join Tate- " • Which late bathe in England doo make thys piper tlrynne, That now in our EnglysA thys booke is pilaw., tone.'

"His mill was situate at or near Stevenage, in Ffertfordsbire ; and that it was considered worthy of especial notice is evident from an entry made in Henry the Seventh's Household Book, on the 25th of May 1498—' For a ro- warde geven at the paper-mylne, 168. 8d.' And again in 1499—' Geven in rewarde to Tate of the mylne, 6s. 8d: " Was this a payment or a present on the part of the close-fisted Tudor?

The second and third chapters contain a history of the progress of papermaking ; in which the practice of the art is indicated, and the modern methods by machinery are described at length, and illustrated by eats and 'specimens. With the description of the actual processes of the manufacture are pleasantly mingled some collateral facts, often of the nature of anecdote ; as this amount of the first avoidance and subsequent use of the paper-mark in the Ireland forgeries—the most skilful literary imposture of modern times if not of any time.

"This gentleman tells us, at one part of his explanation, that the sheet of paper which he used was the outside of several others, on some of which ac- counts had been kept in the reign of Charles the First ; and, being at that time wholly unacquainted with the water-marks used in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, I carefully selected (says he) two half-sheets, not having any mark whatever, on which I penned my first effusion.' A few pages further " on he writes—' Being thus urged forward to the production of more manu- scripts, it became necessary that I should possessai sufficient quantity of ora paper to enable me to proceed ; in consequence of which, I applied to it bookseller named Verey, in Great May's Buildings, St. Martin's Lane, who, for the sum of five shillings, suffered me to take from all the folio and quarto volumes in his shop the fly-leavee which they contained. By this means I was amply stored with that commodity : nor did I fear any mention of the circumstance by Mr. Verey, whose quiet unsuspecting disposition, I was well convinced, would never lead him to make the transaction public • in addition to which, he was not likely even to know anything concerning tile supposed Shaksperian discovery by myself, and even if he had, I do not imagine that my purchase of the old .paper in question would have excited in hini the smallest degree of suspicion. As I was fully aware from the variety of water-marks which are in existence at the present day, that they must have constantly been altered since the period of Elizabeth, and being for some time wholly unacquainted with the water-marks of that age, I very care- fully produced my first specimens of the writing on such sheets of old paper as had no mark whatever. Having heard it frequently stated that the ap- pearance of such marks on the papers would have greatly tended to establish their validity, I listened attentively to every remark which was made upon the subject ; and from thence I at length gleaned the intelligence that a -Jug was the prevalent water-mark of the reign of Elizabeth : in consequence of which, I inspected all the sheets of old paper then in my possession; and having selected such as had the jug upon them, I produced the succeeding manuscripts upon these, being careful, however, to mingle with them a cer- tain number of blank leaves, that the production on a sudden of so many water-marks might not excite suspicion in the breasts of those persons who were most conversant with the manuscripts.'"

In all that regards the various processes by machinery, whether in preparing the rags or straw, (for we hear little of other material

• Paper and Paperinaking, Ancient and Modern. By Richard Herring. With an Introduction, by the Rev. George Croly, LL.D. Published by Longman and Co. as in general use,) or in finishing the converted " pulp " into per- fect paper, Mr. Herring is full and explicit. In the most essen- tially curious and important stage—the conversion of the rags or other substances into "pulp," and then into the sheet of paper however unfinished—he is brief and indeed curt. There may be, as he seems to intimate at the opening of his third chapter, "secrets of trade" involved; or it may be that the pro- cess is so purely natural that there is nothing to tell. Paper can be made of almost anything if the material has a corrugated edge which will enable it to cohere in the mass. There are standing professional jokes as to what is put into paper, espe- cially cheap paper. Vegetable fibre, produced by many families of the vegetable kingdom, is the most fit raw material. Of these plants flax is perhaps the best; at all events, its transforma- tion into linen, and the wear and washing it undergoes as linen, prepare it for the purpose of the manufacture better_ and more cheaply than the papermaker could do by any artificial process. If these rags, or any other substances properly prepared, be saturated with water, they will in time resolve themselves into pulp. This pulp forms the basis or raw material of paper, and is not unlike gruel in appearance. It should be sufficiently thin to allow itself to be spread by a dexterous movement of the workman equally over the mould; which is essentially a sieve, the wire-work allowing the water to drain away, and impressing its pattern upon the sheet, as " "wove," &c. In practical paper- making, of course there is a great deal to do in preparation. Rags have to be sorted, cleaned by two or three processes, cut into bits

• by machines, and it might be said triturated, to facilitate the form- ation of pulp. In practice, .too, a good deal of what is ()ailed "adulteration" goes on with the pulp. In machine-made paper, the workman's hand and his " mould " give place to extensive complex-looking yet beautifully simple-working machinery ; and various processes have to be undergone before the paper finally leaves the mill. But when the papermaker has poured enough pulp into his mould to form a single sheet of paper, shaken his mould to render the sheet of equable thickness, allowed an instant for the water to drain away, and turned the sheet fiat upon a piece of felt, the paper is made : and this is the wonder of the business. The rest, even the machinery, is only common manu- facturing. These remarks apply to writing or printing papers, whose mate- rials must be white, or capable of being bleached. Animal sub- stances, such as silk or woollen, are useless : the "bleach" will not act upon them. For coarse brown packing-papers anything will suffice, even old ropes, matting, &c. : ropes and matting, however, are essentially vegetable.

The results of science applied to manufactures are not all gain. Speed, and what is more thought of, cheapness, are indeed attained, but it is often at the expense of goodness in some way. In paper the consequences soon exhibited themselves ; and though such ex- treme cases as the following passage contains may now be remedied, yet time, it is feared, would operate as mischievously on the fabric of machine-made paper. Hence the best account-books are still composed of hand-made paper ; the wonders of machinery being left for cheaper and more perishable uses. "Even the rags and tatters cast off by the very poorest of the poor may now be forwarded after sunrise many miles distant, and before sunset re- ceived back again converted into a becoming groundwork for the most en- chanting billet-doux. Still, productions of this character, when contrasted with the results of a slow and simple manipulation of finer materials, even to the unpractised eye will be found far inferior as regards the one grand test of superiority, viz. durability. The slower the process of manufacture is conducted from beginning to end, from the trituration of the stuff' in the rag-engine, to the formation of the sheet, its sizing, drying, and rolling, the stronger and more durable will the paper ultimately turn out. No. 17, which is a specimen of paper thus carefully made, and almost as tough and durable as parchment, is capable of sustaining a weight of no less than 200 pounds, simply by means of a slip the width of a bank-note. If, however, we glance at the other extreme, and take the aids frequently adopted to pro- duce 'Japer of apparent excellence from comparatively worthless materials, we shall find occasion to regret more than one form of artificial assistance, which is perpetually liable to objection. The effects, for instance, of exces- sive bleaching are still occasionally manifested, although, by a bettereystem of washing the pulp, and the use of counteracting chemicals, evils which at one time resulted therefrom are now mainly checked. Within the recollec- tion of my father, it was not at all an uncommon occurrence for a parcel of paper to become so completely perished from the circumstance of its not having been thoroughly washed after bleaching, that to draw a sheet as a aample, and to fold it up in the usual way, was found utterly impossible, without the sheets being cracked or broken at every fold. In some in- stances, the fibre was so completely destroyed that an entire ream, composed of 480 sheets, might be as readily snapped asunder as a piece of rotten wood, merely by giving it a sharp blow against the back of a chair."

In a late notice of Dr. Royle's "Fibrous Plants of India," we observed that it was not only the fitness of a material for paper- making and its present plentifulness that had to be looked to. There was the difficulty, of getting a trade to change its ways ; the necessity of considering whether an article which being now waste could be procured in apparently unlimited quantities

• could be so procured when a demand sprang up ; and finally, how fax the cost of procuring it, transporting it, and preparing it, would not exceed the present price of rags. For it must be borne in mind, that their value arises solely from demand, except the small cost of collecting them. The labour of producing them has been already paid for in the price of the linen, &c. The practical answer indicates that this is the great difficulty. Mr. Herring thus speaks on the subject, after he has described the various ac- knowledged substances used in paper-making—as rags, ropes, bag- ging,- canvass.

*Although by far the greater portion of the materials employed are such as we have already alluded to, it is nut from their possessing any exclusive

suitableness—since carious fibrous vegetable substances have frequently been used, and are indeed still successfully employed—big rather on account of their comparatively trifling value, arising from the limited use to which they are otherwise applicable. The agitation of late, which was partly occasioned by the war, and partly by a sudden and unprecedented demand, that there was a great scarcity of fibrous materials fit to be used in papermaking, coupled with an advance in the price of at least twenty per cent, and still further heightened by the offer of 10001. to any one who could procure an advantageous substitute, has necessarily called forth many suggestions; but, to quote the words of Dr. Forbes Etoyle, The generality of modern experi- mentalists seem to be wholly unacquainted with the labours of their reds- ceasore, many of them commencing improvement by repeating experiments which had already been made, and announcing results as new which had long previously been ascertained.' The latest suggestion of the kind, and indeed the only one worth referring to, is that which Lord Derby recently brought forward in the House of Lords. He first referred to a bill before the other House of Parliament for incorporating a company established for the manufacture of paper from flax straw. Of course there is little new in this. The rags or materials already employed are composed, as everybody knows, to a very great extent, of the fibre of flax, and besides, possess this great advantage, that they have been repeatedly prepared for papermaking by the numerous alkaline washings which they necessarily receive during their period of use, which, if left to the papermaker, as would be the case with flax in its raw state, to be done all at once, (and it must be done before the fibre is fit for use,) would add so fearfully to the expense as to render its adoption for printing or writing paper altogether unadvisable. However, Lord Derby proceeds—'It was proposed to employ the fibres of various plants indigenous to the West Indies, such as the plantain, the aloe, and others, which grow in vast abundance, and which were utterly valueless at the pre- sent moment. Ho need not say that an immense abundance of this mate- rial could be produced ; and he wished only to mention, that on one estate in Demerara no less than 160,000 plantain-trees were cut down every year, the trees going to waste, as they were cut down only for the purpose of getting at the fruit; and this wasted material contained 250 tons of fibre, capable of being manufactured into paper.' "Now, admitting all this, which Lord Derby is reported to have said, I can again assert that there is nothing whatever new in it. I have specimens of paper from the same materials which were made several years ago. The cost, however, of reducing the plantain into fibre, coupled with the expense of freight, was found, and will still be found, to bring up the price so much as to effectually exclude it from the manufacture of paper ; for this simple reason, that rags, of necessity, must continue accumulating, and before it will answer the purpose of the papermaker to employ new material—whit:di is not so well adapted for his purpose as the old—he must be enabled to pur- chase it for considerably less than it would be worth in the manufacture of

textile fabrics. •

"To convey some idea of the number of substances which have been really tried—in the library. of the British Museum may be seen a book, printed in Low Dutch, containing upwards of sixty spesimeue of paper, made of differ- ent materials, the result of one man's experiments alone, so far back as the year 1772. In fact, almost every species pf tough fibrous vegetable, and even animal substance, has at one time or another been employed,--even the roots of trees, their bark, the bine of hops, the tendrils of the vine, the stalks of the nettle, the common thistle, the stem of the hollyhock, the sugar-cane, cabbage-stalks, wood-shavings, saw-dust, hay, straw, willow, and the like.

"At the present time straw is occasionally used, sometimes in connexion with other materials, such as linen or cotton rags, and even with consider- able advantage, providing the processes of preparation are thoroughly un- derstood. Where such is not the case, and the silica contained in the straw has not been destroyed, (by means of a strong alkali,) the paper will inva- riably be found more or less brittle ; in some eases so much so as to be hardly applicable to any purpose whatever of practical utility.