Holland was far advanced in paper-making in the seventeenth century. The revolution of 1688 having seriously interrupted the art in England, that country imported paper from Holland during that period amounting to £100,000. It was a native of Holland, Rittenhouse, who introduced paper-making in America and erected a mill near Philadelphia in the early years of the eighteenth century, and there made paper from linen rags. The Dutch also had substituted cylinders armed with blades in place of stampers and used their windmills to run them. The Germans and French experimented with wood and straw. In the latter part of the eighteenth century some manufacturers in Europe had learned to make white paper from white rags, and as good in quality, and some think better, than is made at the present day. The essentials of paper making by hand from rags and raw vegetable fibres, the soaking of fibres in water and boiling them in lyes, the beating, rolling, smoothing, sizing and polishing of the paper, were then known and practised. But the best paper was then a dear commodity. The art of bleaching coloured stock was unknown, and white paper was made alone from stock that came white into the mill. The processes were nearly all hand operations. “Beating” was pounding in a mortar. The pulp was laid by hand upon moulds made of parallel strands of coarse brass wire; and the making of the pulp by grinding wood and treating it chemically to soften it was experimental. The nineteenth century produced a revolution. It introduced the use of modern machinery, and modern chemical processes, by which all known varieties and sizes of paper, of all colours, as well as paper vessels, are made daily in immense quantities in all civilised countries, from all sorts of fibrous materials. Knight, in his _Mechanical Dictionary_, gives a list of nearly 400 different materials for paper making that had been used or suggested, for the most part within the century and up to twenty years ago, and the number has since increased. The modern revolution commenced in 1799, when Louis Robert, an employee of François Didot of Essones, France, invented and patented the first machine for making paper in a long, wide, continuous web. The French government in 1800 granted him a reward of 8,000 francs. The machine was then exhibited in England and there tested with success. It was there that Messrs. Fourdrinier, a wealthy stationery firm, purchased the patents, expended £60,000 for improvements on the machine, and first gave to the world its practical benefits. This expenditure bankrupted them, as the machines were not at once remunerative, and parliament refused to grant them pecuniary assistance. Gamble, Donkin, Koops, the Fourdriniers, Dickenson, and Wilkes, were the first inventors to improve the Robert machine, and to give it that form which in many essential features remains to-day. They, together with later inventors, gave to the world a new system of paper making.