Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/451

 extract from an account written in 1301 on linen paper. In this specimen the mark is a circle surmounted by a sprig, at the end of which is a star. The paper is thick, firm, and well grained; and its water-lines and water-marks (vergures et pontuseaux) may readily be distinguished.

The date was carried considerably higher by Schwandner, Principal Keeper of the Imperial Library at Vienna, who found among the charters of the Monastery of Göss in Upper Stiria one in a state of decay, only seven inches long and three wide. So highly did he estimate the value of this curious relic as to publish in 1788 a full account of his discovery in a thin quarto volume, which bears the following title, "Chartam linteam antiquissimam, omnia hactenus producta specimina ætate suâ superantem, ex cimelüs Bibliothecæ Augustæ Vindobonensis exponit Jo. Ge. Schwandner," &c. The document is a mandate of Frederick II. Emperor of the Romans, entrusting to the Archbishop of Saltzburg and the Duke of Austria the determination of a dispute between the Duke of Carinthia and the Monastery of Göss respecting the property of the latter in Carinthia. Schwandner proves the date of it to be 1243. He does not say whether it has any lines or water-mark, but is quite satisfied from its flexibility and other qualities, that it is linen. Although on the first discovery of this document some doubt was expressed as to its genuineness, it appears to have risen in estimation with succeeding writers; and we apprehend it is rather from inadvertence than from any deficiency in the evidence, that it is not noticed at all by Schönemann, Ebert, Delandine, or by Horne. Due attention is, however, bestowed upon it by August Friedrich Pfeiffer ''Uber Bücher-Handschriften, Erlangen 1810, p.'' 39, 40.

With regard to the circumstances which led to the invention of the paper now in common use, or the country in which it took place, we find in the writers on the subject from Polydore Virgil to the present day nothing but conjectures or confessions of ignorance. Wehrs supposes, and others follow him, that in making paper linen rags were either by accident or through design at first mixed with cotton rags, so as to produce a paper, which was partly linen and partly cotton, and that this led by