We introduce it here to show the _color_ and the (thereby indicated) composition of the INK employed. It was _writing-ink_. It contained sulphate of iron (copperas), in combination with vegetable astringent matter, and with very little carbon. The vegetable substance, imperfectly united to the mineral ingredient, has (in obedience to the laws of organic matter) been decomposed and “resolved into its original elements.” It has disappeared; but the IRON remains with its yellow stain, an imperishable memorial of that humble, nameless workman, more enduring than that which the plaintive man of Uz desired; for if those words had been “graven with an IRON PEN and lead in the rock _forever_,” that anticipated eternity might have faded of realization by the action of the rain, the frost, the dust, and innumerable imaginable atmospheric vicissitudes, or, (what is worse,) “the wrath of man.”—Some Cambyses might have demolished the rock itself, and left no more of the inscription than can now be read of those once carved on the cliffs of Edom, the God-created walls of Petra in the valley of EL GHOR.
This pale rusty WORD-STAMPING on the fragile and easily combustible paper, has outlasted the inscriptions once visible in gigantic characters on the four sides of the Memphitic pyramids; and it is only an incidental result of the intelligence diffused and the learning promoted by the invention thus begun, that we can now read the long-buried records of Nineveh, the epitaphs of the Thebaic kings, and the gravings on the precipitous fronts of the mountains which surround the ruins of Persepolis.
All writers upon this subject have strangely overlooked the fact that the art of impressing or printing letters with a metallic stamp or type on parchment, as a substitute for pen-work, is about a thousand years older than the period above specified as the date of the invention of the modern art of printing. The CODEX ARGENTEUS, (the oldest translation of the entire Bible into any European language,) is a famous book, in the Library of the University of Upsala in Sweden.
(We give the particulars of its history in our Appendix.)
This “antique” is on purple _vellum_, (which is parchment made of _calf-skin_,) and all the letters are SILVER, (whence the name Codex Argenteus, the “silver book,”) manifestly impressed on the page by a metallic stamp or type, each letter evidently being on a separate stock or handle, and applied by manual pressure. We give a specimen of this style of work. It may be called printing, but can not be denominated _manuscript_, for that is (literally) “hand-writing,” which this certainly is not.