PRINTING, in the widest sense of the word, may be defined to be the art of producing copies of any writing or other marks by pressure, either upon a substance so soft as (like wax or clay) to take the shape, whether in relief or by indentation, of the stamp applied to it, and yet not so perfectly fluid (like water) as to refuse to retain the form so given to it ; or upon a substance sufficiently bibulous or otherwise attractive as to receive colour from some pigment with which the stamp is daubed. The essence of printing is the production of a copy by premium. Correctly speaking, however, it is not an exact copy or fee-simile which printing produces in any case; so far from that, wherever the surface is raised in the stamp, it is sunk in the iinpres aim), and rice road, and even a merely coloured mark is always reversed in form ; but, what is alone of importance, all the impressions are exact copies of one another, and also bear a certain and perfectly assignable relation to the stamp or type.
Even on a theoretical view of the subject, printing by means of merely a variegated surface or stamp, or, in other words, the repro duction, in soft substances, of cameos and intaglios, would/ seem to be the simpler and more obvious of the two kinds of printing we have mentioned. This may be said to be printing by pressure alone. In the other kind of printing, by the transference of colour, there is required the introduction, in addition to the type and its recipient, of a third element or agent, namely, the colour to be transferred. And this was an addition very little likely ever to be made until the idea of multiplying copies of coloured marks had itself occurred, that is, until the very object had been thought of which this was the only means of accomplishing, and which was the only object this process was suited to accomplish. Having a seal or cut stamp in his hand, the making an impression with that upon wax or any other soft substance was extremely natural for a person wishing ou any occasion to leave his mark or sign; it was the same thing, in fact, with notching a piece of wood or stone with a knife or other sharp instrument, with this difference only, that the knife makes its marks by excision, or alto gether removing and abstracting part of the substance operated upon ; the stamp, by extrusion, or merely pushing it aside. Or still more
nearly it resembles the rudest and readiest of all ways of making a mark, namely, by dealing a blow. But it is a mode of making a mark only ; that is its sole purpose and object. There is no thought, so long as this kind of printing exclusively is used, of multiplying copies of the same mark ; tbat is an idea far removed from the first and most natural employment of a dry stamp or seal, and not perhaps more likely to be suggested by such stamping or sealing (although capable of being so realised) than by some other things—by the mere common process, for instance, of copying by imitation. If a transcriber had ever had before him a written page, with the ink not yet dry, which he was laboriously reproducing with his pen, the slowness of his pro cedure, especially if he were pursued by an active and growing demand on the part of the public for hooka, might have led him to the thought of the possibility of performing the whole task in a manner at once, by merely impressing the wet writing upon the blank paper, and then re-transferring it from the reversed copy thus made to another sheet, in order to recover the original position of the characters. And if by any means the reversed copy could be kept moist, or its moisture repeatedly renewed, here was a method of procuring in the same easy manner an indefinite number of copies. The mechanical facilities were still to be invented, but this was the elementary idea of what we have been regarding as the second kind of printing; which, it thus appears to us, would probably not be suggested by the first kind at all, but rather by the desire of effecting an object (namely, the multiplying of copies) altogether different from that (namely, the mere snaking of a mark) which was the primary purpose of a dry stamp or seal, and only presenting itself at a much later and more advanced stage in the progress of civilisation.