Page:The History of Ink.djvu/46

40 history, chronology, and genealogy, (as well as in regard to the title and inheritance of estates,) are found obscured and obliterated, causing losses, public and private, that need but to be mentioned to be properly estimated.

In the appendix will be found a facsimile of a sheet upon which various specimens of ink were thoroughly and fairly tested, which is a brief but emphatic demonstration of a difference of qualities by difference of results.

To show what can be done in the preservation of writing on material even frailer than such paper as we employ, we need but produce the specimen of Egyptian writing on papyrus, pronounced by Champollion to have been executed more than sixteen hundred (1600) years before the birth of Christ, yet still in preservation and legible, as may be seen by the representation we give of it.

This is undoubtedly as old as any specimen of phonetic characters or written letters (representing sounds, not ideas or objects,) extant, made by marking with a fluid upon any substance. There are inscriptions of letters upon stone, for which an earlier date of 4000 years B. C., is claimed with truth. But this is -writing, absolutely 3500 years old!