The reader, perhaps, does not know why the London "Times" is the first journal of Europe. I will tell him. The starting of this great newspaper ninety-nine years ago was a mere incident in the development of another business. Almost every one who has stood in a printing-office watching compositors set type must have sometimes asked himself, why not have whole words cast together, instead of obliging the printer to pick up each letter separately? Such words as _and_, _the_, _but_, _if_, _is_, and even larger words, like _although_ and _notwithstanding_, occur very often in all compositions. How easy it would be, inexperienced persons think, to take up a long word, such as _extraordinary_, and place it in position at one stroke. I confess that I had this idea myself, long before I knew that any one else had ever had it. In the year 1785 there was a printer in London named John Walter, well-established in business, who was fully resolved on giving this system a trial. At great expense and trouble he had all the commonest words and phrases cast together. He would give his type-founder an order like this:-- Send me a hundredweight, made up in separate pounds, of _heat_, _cold_, _wet_, _dry_, _murder_, _fire_, _dreadful_ _robbery_, _atrocious outrage_, _fearful calamity_, and _alarming explosion_. This system he called logographic printing,--logographic being a combination of two Greek words signifying word-writing. In order to give publicity to the new system, on which he held a patent, as well as to afford it a fuller trial, he started a newspaper, which he called the "Daily Universal Register." The newspaper had some little success from the beginning; but the logographic printing system would not work. Not only did the compositors place obstacles in the way, but the system itself presented difficulties which neither John Walter nor any subsequent experimenter has been able to surmount. "The whole English language," said Walter, in one of his numerous addresses to the public, "lay before me in a confused arrangement. It consisted of about ninety thousand words. This multitudinous mass I reduced to about five thousand, by separating the parcels, and removing the obsolete words, technical terms, and common terminations."