Once one of the fruits of the Nile, now no longer growing there. On its fragile leaves were recorded and preserved the ancient literatures--the records of dynasties--the songs of the Hebrew prophets--the early annals of Greece and Rome--the vast, lost tomes of Alexandria. Those which were fortunately preserved and transferred to more enduring forms now constitute the greater part of all we have of the writings of those departed ages. In making paper from papyrus, the inner portion next to the pith was separated into thin leaves; these were laid in two or more layers, moistened and pressed together to form a leaf; two or more leaves united at their edges if desired, or end to end, beaten smooth with a mallet, polished with a piece of iron or shell, the ends, or sides, or both, of the sheet sometimes neatly ornamented, and then rolled on a wooden cylinder. The Romans and other ancient nations imported most of their papyrus from Egypt, although raising it to considerable extent in their own swamps. In the seventh century, the Saracens conquered Egypt and carried back therefrom, papyrus, and the knowledge of how to make paper from it to Europe. Parchment manufactured from the skins of young calves, kids, lambs, sheep, and goats, was an early rival of papyrus, and was known and used in Europe before papyrus was there introduced. The softening of vegetable and woody fibre of various kinds, flax and raw cotton and rags, and reducing it into pulp, drying, beating, and rolling it into paper, seem to have been suggested to Europe by the introduction of papyrus, for we learn of the first appearance of such paper by the Arabians, Saracens, Spaniards and the French along through the eighth, ninth, and tenth and eleventh centuries. Papyrus does not, however, appear to have been superseded until the twelfth century. Public documents are still extant written in the twelfth century on paper made from flax and rags; and paper mills began to put in an appearance in Germany in the fourteenth century, in which the fibre was reduced to pulp by stampers. England began to make paper in the next century. Pulping the fibre by softening it in water and beating the same had then been practised for four centuries. Rollers in the mills for rolling the pulp into sheets were introduced in the fifteenth century, and paper makers began to distinguish their goods from those made by others by water marks impressed in the pulp sheets. The jug and the pot was one favourite water mark in that century, succeeded by a fool’s cap, which name has since adhered to paper of a certain size, with or without the cap. So far was the making of paper advanced in Europe that about 1640 wall paper began to be made as a substitute for tapestry; although as to this fashion the Chinese were still ahead some indefinite number of centuries.