Page:De Vinne, Invention of Printing (1876).djvu/50

40 employed as a salve." From this crude recipe one may form a correct opinion of the quality of the scientific knowledge then applied to medicine and the mechanical arts.

These mixtures, which are more like liquid shoe blacking than writing fluid, were used, with immaterial modifications, by the scribes of the dark ages. Useful as they may have been for their methods of writing, they could not have been applied to the inking of a metal surface engraved in relief. If the brass stamps described on a previous page had been brushed over never so carefully with these watery inks, the metal surface would not be covered with a smooth film of color. The ink would collect in spots and blotches. When stamped on paper or vellum, the ink thereupon impressed would be of irregular blackness, illegible in spots, and easily effaced. Writing ink, thickened with gum, has but a feeble encaustic property. It will not be absorbed, unless it is laid on in little pools, and unless the writing surface is scratched by a pen to aid the desired absorption. The flat impression of a smooth metal stamp could not make a fluid or a gummy ink penetrate below the writing surface. It was, no doubt, by reason of the inferior appearance of impressions of this nature that the brass stamps described on a previous page found so limited a use.

An unsuitable ink may seem but a trifling impediment to the development of printing, but if there had been no other, this would have been an insurmountable obstacle. The modern printer, who sees that the chief ingredients of printing ink are the well-known materials smoke-black and oil, may think that an ignorance of this mixture, or an inability to discover it, is ridiculous and inexcusable. Modern printing ink is but one of many inventions which could be named as illustrating the real simplicity of a long delayed improvement. Simple as it may seem, the mixing of color with oil was a great invention which wrought a revolution in the art of painting.

This invention, attributed by some authors to unknown Italian painters of the fourteenth century, and by others to