spray of water plays evenly across its width, so that the entire sheet
is unrolled, dampened, for the better taking of the impression to be
made upon it, and firmly rewound, all in twenty minutes. Each of these
rolls will make about 7,600 copies of the _Tribune_.

When all is ready, paper and stereotyped pages in place, and all
adjustments carefully attended to, the almost thinking machine starts
at the pressman's touch, and with well nigh incredible speed prints,
places sheet within sheet, pastes the parts together, cuts, folds and
counts out the completed papers with an accuracy and constancy beyond
the power of human eye and hand.

The printing press has held its own in the rapid advance of that
wonderful evolution which, within the last half century, in every
phase of thought and in every movement of material forces placed under
the dominion of men, has almost made one of our years the equivalent
of one of the old centuries. Within average recollection the single
cylinder printing machine, run by hand or steam, and able under best
conditions to print one side of a thousand sheets in one hour, was the
marvel of mankind. In 1850, one such, that we started in an eastern
Ohio town, drew such crowds of wondering on-lookers that we were
obliged to bar the open doorway to keep them at a distance which would
allow the astonishing thing to work at all.

To-day, in the United States alone, five millions of dollars are
invested in the building of printing presses, many of which, by
slightest violence to figure of speech, do think and speak.
Inspiration was not wholly a thing of long-gone ages, for if ever men
received into brain and worked out through hand the divine touch, then
were Hoe, and Scott, and Campbell taught of God.