blown in Sussex, profitable to the makers, and convenient for the users.
Our _home-spun paper_ might be found beneficial." The present German
printing-paper is made so disagreeable both to printers and readers from
their paper-manufacturers making many more reams of paper from one cwt.
of rags than formerly. Rags are scarce, and German writers, as well as
their language, are voluminous.

Mr. Astle deeply complains of the inferiority of our _inks_ to those of
antiquity; an inferiority productive of the most serious consequences,
and which appears to originate merely in negligence. From the important
benefits arising to society from the use of ink, and the injuries
individuals may suffer from the frauds of designing men, he wishes the
legislature would frame some new regulations respecting it. The
composition of ink is simple, but we possess none equal in beauty and
colour to that used by the ancients; the Saxon MSS. written in England
exceed in colour anything of the kind. The rolls and records from the
fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, compared with those of
the fifth to the twelfth centuries, show the excellence of the earlier
ones, which are all in the finest preservation; while the others are so
much defaced, that they are scarcely legible.

The ink of the ancients had nothing in common with ours, but the colour
and gum. Gall-nuts, copperas, and gum make up the composition of our
ink; whereas _soot_ or _ivory-black_ was the chief ingredient in that of
the ancients.[13]

Ink has been made of various colours; we find gold and silver ink, and
red, green, yellow, and blue inks; but the black is considered as the
best adapted to its purpose.