script of a long-lost work of Cicero or Livy, or of any document worth the labor and the time requisite to revive the letters or read them. Mr. Astle's slight lapse of pen or mind, in stating (eighth paragraph) that "Blue or yellow ink was seldom used except in manuscripts," reminds us of Noah Webster's reason, given in the first edition of his quarto dictionary, for the use of the word "Hand" instead of "Island," viz., that the latter spelling was "found only in books." Perhaps the venerable Mr. Astle would have been as much astonished to learn that he himself had always written manuscript, whenever he put pen to paper, as the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, in Moliere's comedy was to learn that he "had been speaking prose all his life."
A comparatively recent author gives the following as the sum and substance of his knowledge on this division of the subject of our book.
WRITING INKS.
Dark-colored liquids were used to stain letters previously engraved on some hard substance, long before they were made to flow in the calamus or pen for forming them on a smooth surface; and the Chinese made their "Indian Ink" in the same
