Lambinet, in his “Recherches sur l’Origine de l’Imprimerie,” gives an account of two stone stamps of the form of small tablets, the letters of which were cut in _intaglio_ and reverse, similar to the two of which impressions are above given. They were found in 1808, near the village of Nais, in the department of the Meuse; and as the letters, being in reverse, could not be made out, the owner of the tablets sent them to the Celtic Society of Paris, where M. Dulaure, to whose examination they were submitted, was of opinion that they were a kind of matrices or hollow stamps, intended to be applied to soft substances or such as were in a state of fusion. He thought they were stamps for vessels containing medical compositions; and if his reading of one of the inscriptions be correct, the practice of stamping the name of a quack and the nature of his remedy, in relief on the side of an ointment-pot or a bottle, is of high antiquity. The letters Q. JUN. TAURI. ANODY. NUM. AD OMN. LIPP. M. Dulaure explains thus: _Quinti Junii Tauridi anodynum ad omnes lippas_;[I-10] an inscription which is almost literally rendered by the title of a specific still known in the neighbourhood of Newcastle-on-Tyne, “_Dr. Dud’s lotion, good for sore eyes_.” [Footnote I-10: M. Dulaure’s latinity is bad. “_Lippas_” certainly is not the word. His translation is, “Remède anodin de Quintus Junius Tauridus, pour _tous les maux_ d’yeux.” Other stone stamps, supposed to have been used by oculists to mark the vessels containing their medicaments, were discovered and explained long before M. Dulaure published his interpretation. See “WALCHII Antiquitates Medicæ Selectæ, Jenæ, 1772,” Num. 1 and 2, referred to by Von Murr.] Besides such stamps as have already been described, the ancients used brands, both figured and lettered, with which, when heated, they marked their horses, sheep, and cattle, as well as criminals, captives, and refractory or runaway slaves. The Athenians, according to Suidas, marked their Samian captives with the figure of an owl; while Athenians captured by the Samians were marked with the figure of a galley, and by the Syracusans with the figure of a horse. The husbandman at his leisure time, as we are informed by Virgil, in the first book of the Georgics, “Aut pecori signa, aut numeros impressit acervis;” and from the third book we learn that the operation was performed by branding: “Continuoque notas et nomina gentis _inurunt_.”[I-11] [Footnote I-11: HERMANNUS HUGO, De prima Origine Scribendi, cap. xix. De Notis Servilibus, et cap. xx. De Notis pecudum. A further account of the ancient _stigmata_, and of the manner in which slaves were marked, is to be found in PIGNORIUS, De Servis.] * * *