Page:A dictionary of printers and printing.djvu/28

 substance called Maltha, which signified mortar, plaster, or clay. The Sweeds, also inscribed or engraved their laws on wood; hence the term balkar, which signify fairs, from balkan, a balk or beam. Wooden boards, either plain or covered with wax, were used long before the time of Homer; the former were called schedæ, whence our word shedule. These tablets, or slices of wood when fastened together, formed book, codex, so called from its resemblance to the trunk of a tree, cut into planks, hence our word code. The ancients generally used box, or citron wood; in the middle ages, beech was principally employed. The rich Romans used thin pieces of ivory, instead of wooden tablets.

Wood, however, was most generally used both for public and private purposes, in various forms and modes. Thus, in Ezekiel, "Moreover, thou son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it, for Judah, and for the children of Israel his companions: then take another stick, and write upon it, for Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and for all the house of Israel his companions." And again, in Deuteronomy, speaking of the obedience to the laws of God, "And thou shalt write them (the laws) upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates." The Scythians conveyed their ideas by marking or cutting certain figures, and a variety of lines, upon splinters or billets of wood.

Dionysius of Helicamassus writes, that an ancient treaty between the Romans and the Gabini, was written on wooden shield, which had previously been covered with the skin of an ox, that had been sacrificed when the parties concluded the terms of agreement

The original manner of writing among the ancient Britons, was by cutting the letters with a knife upon sticks, which were most commonly squared, and sometimes formed into three sides; consequently a single stick contained either four or three lines. The squares were used for general subjects, and for stanzas of four lines in poetry. Several sticks, with writing upon them, were put together, forming a kind of frame, which was called Peithynen or Elucidator, and was so constructed, that each stick might be turned for the facility of reading, the end of each running out alternately on both sides of the frame. The following is a correct translation of one of these Elucidators : —

The weapon of the wise is reason. Let the exile be moving. Commerce with generous ones. Let the very feeble run away; let the very powerful proceed. The swineherd is proud of his swine. A gale is almost ice in a narrow place. Long penance to slander. The frail Indeg has many living relations.

The alphabet of the primitive Welch letters contains sixteen radical characters, which have twenty-four secondary ones, modifications, or inflexions, making forty in all; and it went under the name of Coelbren y Beirz, the billet of signs of the Bards, or the Bardic Alphabet. The curious reader may be desirous of knowing in what manner this curious relic was preserved to the present time; in reply to which, in the obscure and mountainous parts of Wales, the system of bardism is to be found entire, but more known to the world by the name of druidism, which was properly that branch of bardism relating to religion and education. Bardism was universal, and comprehended all the knowledge or philosophy of the ancient times; druidism was its religious code, and ovatism, its arts and sciences. The preservation of the character may be principally

LjOOQ IC