Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/105

Rh paper-mills on their journeys to Italy, even though they may not have had a real knowledge of the art. In any case it is not impossible that enterprising men of business had even before Ulman Stromer conceived the plan of establishing paper-mills with the help of Italian workmen; for the expense of transporting paper across the Alps must have made it very high, and there was abundant prospect of making the enterprise profitable in the fact that there were no paper-mills north of the Alps except in southern France. We are, in fact, inclined to believe that a few paper-mills existed in Germany at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries. Thus, the paper on which



the copy of a document of 1315 is written is a specimen of the German Holbein's paper, for it bears as a water-mark an ox's head, which, according to Gutermann, was the arms of the Holbein family, whose paper-mill was standing at Ravensburg, according to some in 1270, according to others in 1324. But the fact that the Fabrianos also worked a similar water-mark into their paper bears on the other side. It has not been possible to prove that the Holbein paper-mills were in operation before the year 1407, when the first authentic mention is made of a paper factory at Ravensburg, and of the paper-makers Cunrat, Peter, and Stengli. There were also paper-mills about 1347 at Au, near Munich, and in 1356 at Leesdorf in Lower Austria; but documentary evidence to