remain to be given for a yet ampler furnishing, or for providing conservatories, or hanging gardens, or museums, or whatever else might have become matters of taste: while the poor would remove into the vacated brick-houses, and the cottages be left to be inhabited by cows, and the cowsheds, perhaps, by pigs, and the pigsties be demolished; and so there would be a general advance, every one being a gainer in the end. Perhaps a few people were very well content, once upon a time, with their occupation of wading in the ponds and ditches of Egypt, to gather the papyrus, and with pressing and drying the leaves, and glueing them crosswise, and polishing them for the style with which they were to be written upon: and these people might think it very hard that any better paper should ever be used to the exclusion of theirs. Yet wide-spreading generations of their children are now employed in the single department of providing the gums and oils required in the composition of the inks which would never have been known if papyrus had been used at this day. If we consider the labour employed in the other departments of inkmaking, and in the preparation of the rags of which paper is made, and in the making and working of the mills from which the beautiful substance issues as if created by invisible hands, and in packing, carrying, and selling the quires and reams, and in printing them, and in constructing and managing the stupendous machinery by which this part of the process is carried on, we shall be quite willing to leave the papyrus to be the home of the dragon-fly, as before the art of writing was known. Saying nothing of the effects of the enlarged communication of minds by means of paper, looking only to the amount of labour employed, who will now plead the cause of the papyrus-gatherers against the world? A distinction is, however, made by those who complain of human labour being superseded, between a new provision of material, and a change in the method of working it up. They allow that, as rags make better writing material than papyrus, rags should be used; but contend that if men can dip sieves of the pulp of rags into water, and press the substance between felt, it is a sin to employ a cylinder of wire and a mechanical press to do the same. But this distinction is merely imaginary. If we could employ a man to sow rags and reap paper, we should think it a prodigious waste of time and pains to get paper in the old method; and we do sow rags in the cistern and reap paper from the cylinder; the only difference being, that instead of dew we use spring water, and iron wheels instead of the plough and harrow, and artificial heat instead of sunshine. We might as well wish to keep our agricultural labourers busy all the year trying to manufacture wheat in our farm-house kitchens as recur to the old methods of making paper; and the consumers of bread and of books would fall off in numbers alike in either case.