learning at the Universities of Heidelberg, Erfurt, and Leipzig, but
awakened no response. In 1470 Johann Wessel (1420-89) and in 1476 Rodolph
Agricola (1443-85), two noted Dutch scholars, studied in Italy. On
returning, Agricola, [19] who has been called "the Petrarch of German
lands," did much "to spread the great inheritance of antiquity and the new
civilization to which it had given birth among his uncouth countrymen"
(_barbari_, he calls them). He made Heidelberg, for a time, a center of
humanistic appreciation. Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), a German by birth,
studied in Florence and elsewhere in Italy in 1481 to 1490, and there
learned Hebrew. Returning, he became a professor at Heidelberg and the
father of modern Hebrew studies. In 1506 he published the first Hebrew
grammar. In 1493 the University of Erfurt established a professorship of
Poetry and Eloquence, this being the first German university to
countenance the new learning. In 1523 the first chair of Greek was
established at Vienna. Thus slowly did the revival of learning spread to
northern lands.

THE REVIVAL AIDED BY THE INVENTION OF PAPER AND PRINTING. Very fortunately
for the spread of the new learning an important process and a great
invention now came in at a most opportune time. The process was the
manufacture of paper; the invention that of printing.

The manufacture of paper is probably a Chinese invention, early obtained
by the Arabs. During the Mohammedan occupation of Spain paper mills were
set up there, and a small supply of their paper found its way across the
Pyrenees. The Christians who drove the Mohammedans out lost the process,
and it now came back once more from the East. By about 1250 the Greeks had
obtained the process from Mohammedan sources, and in 1276 the first paper
mill was set up in Italy. In 1340 a paper factory was established at
Padua, and soon thereafter other factories began to make paper at