These early inventions led to the discovery of tables of _wood_; and as _cedar_ has an antiseptic quality from its bitterness, they chose this wood for cases or chests to preserve their most important writings. This well-known expression of the ancients, when they meant to give the highest eulogium of an excellent work, _et cedro digna locuti_, that it was worthy to be written on _cedar_, alludes to the _oil of cedar_, with which valuable MSS. of parchment were anointed, to preserve them from corruption and moths. Persius illustrates this:-- Who would not leave posterity such rhymes As _cedar oil_ might keep to latest times! They stained materials for writing upon, with purple, and rubbed them with exudations from the cedar. The laws of the emperors were published on _wooden tables_, painted with ceruse; to which custom Horace alludes: _Leges incidere ligno_. Such _tables_, the term now softened into _tablets_, are still used, but in general are made of other materials than wood. The same reason for which they preferred the _cedar_ to other wood induced to write on _wax_, as being incorruptible. Men generally used it to write their testaments on, the better to preserve them; thus Juvenal says, _Ceras implere capaces_. This thin paste of wax was also used on tablets of wood, that it might more easily admit of erasure, for daily use. They wrote with an iron bodkin, as they did on the other substances we have noticed. The _stylus_ was made sharp at one end to write with, and blunt and broad at the other, to efface and correct easily: hence the phrase _vertere stylum_, to turn the stylus, was used to express blotting out. But the Romans forbad the use of this sharp instrument, from the circumstance of many persons having used them as daggers. A schoolmaster was killed by the Pugillares or table-books, and the styles of his own scholars.[9] They substituted a _stylus_ made of the bone of a bird, or other animal; so that their writings resembled engravings. When they wrote on softer materials, they employed _reeds_ and _canes_ split like our _pens_ at the points, which the orientalists still use to lay their colour or ink neater on the paper. Naudé observes, that when he was in Italy, about 1642, he saw some of those waxen tablets, called Pugillares, so called because they were held in one hand; and others composed of the barks of trees, which the ancients employed in lieu of paper.