The history of illustration, apart from the merits of individual artists, during the period since the year 1875, is mainly that of the development of what is called Process (q.v.), the term applied to methods of reproducing a drawing or photograph which depend on the use of some mechanical agency in the making of the block, as distinguished from such products of manual skill as steel or wood-engraving, lithography and the like. There is good reason to believe that the art of stereotyping--the multiplication of an already existing block by means of moulds and casts--is as old as the 15th century; and the early processes were, in a measure, a refinement upon this: with the difference that they aimed at the making of a metal block by means of a cast of the lines of the drawing itself, the background of which had been cut away so as to leave the design in a definite relief. Experiments of this nature may be said to have assumed practical shape from the time of the invention of Palmer's process called at first _Glyphography_, about the year 1844; this was afterwards perfected and used to a considerable extent under the name of _Dawson's Typographic Etching_, and its results were in many cases quite admirable, and often appear in books and periodicals of the first part of the period with which we are now concerned. The _Graphic_, for instance, published its first process block in 1876, and the _Illustrated London News_ also made similar experiments at about the same time. From this time begins the gradual application of photography to the uses of illustration, the first successful line blocks made by its help being probably those of Gillot, at Paris, in the early 'eighties. The next stage was to be the invention of some means of reproducing wash drawings. To do this it was necessary for the surface of the block to be so broken up that every tone of the drawing should be represented thereon by a grain holding ink enough to reproduce it. This was finally accomplished by the insertion of a screen, in the camera, between the lens and the plate--the effect of which was to break up the whole surface of the negative into dots, and so secure, when printed on a zinc plate and etched, an approximation to the desired result. Half-tone blocks (as they were called) of this nature (see PROCESS) were used in the _Graphic_ from 1884 and the _Illustrated London News_ from 1885 onwards, the methods at first in favour being those of Meisenbach and Boussod Valadon and Co.'s phototype. Lemercier and Petit of Paris, Angerer and Göschl of Vienna, and F. Ives of Philadelphia also perfected processes giving a similar result, a block by the latter appearing in the _Century_ magazine as early as 1882. Processes of this description had, however, been used for some years before by Henry Blackburn in his _Academy Notes_.