Page:The History of Ink.djvu/47

Rh The Chinese assert that they had the art of writing at a period 2950 years before Christ; but they have no records or monuments of that date; and their characters even to the present time, are entire words, representing objects, ideas or things, not sounds. In the art of printing, they pretend to have preceded the European nations about 2400 years, dating their invention of it from the tenth century before Christ. But they have never advanced beyond the first form of the art—letters engraved on solid wooden blocks—the very method in use by Koster, and his associates, until the invention of moveable types by John Gansfleisch, otherwise named John Gutenberg or Guttemberg, in 1435. In both arts, writing and printing alike, the Chinese have remained stiff, solid and immovable at the first step, with the characteristic unchangeability of the yellow races of Eastern Asia, so opposite to the indefinitely progressive and self-improving energy of the nations whose progenitors proceeded west from the original source and centre of the earth's population. The same ink serves the Chinese both for writing and printing, as does the same kind of paper. This ink they invented about the end of the first century of the Christian era; before which time