Goat leather has never been so much liked by German binders as calf or pig skin. This is partly due to the fact that German bindings are as a rule ornamented with blind tooling, and goat skin is never satisfactory when treated in this way: its grain is against it; but for gold tooling, which has been brought to its greatest perfection by Italian, French and English binders, there is nothing that gives so fine a result as goat leather. Roger Payne saw and liked the natural grain of goat skin, or, as we may now call it, morocco. But he found that in many cases he could get a better impression from his very delicately cut stamps in Russia leather. Here, however, he was restricted to one colour, and his favourite colour, a neutral green, could only be procured in morocco. So he ironed the morocco to flatten its natural hills and dales, and produced something like what is now called “crushed” morocco. Payne’s smooth morocco is, however, not quite our modern “crushed”; it is smoother, because now we “grain” our leather strongly before crushing it, whereas Payne ironed his without first increasing its natural grain by artificial means. Morocco is often badly injured by the ironing being done with irons that are too hot. But Payne went a step farther. No doubt he experimented much with morocco, and it is likely enough that before endeavouring to smoothen out his skins he wetted them thoroughly. If he wetted a fine skin of morocco overnight and left it alone, perhaps doubling it or rolling it up, he would have noticed next morning that the natural grain had become much intensified, due to a slight shrinkage of the leather, and showed as a particularly effective breaking up of the surface. Some such chance led him to make definite experiments with a view to exaggerating the natural grain of morocco, and he very soon found out that if a damped skin was well rolled in one direction it assumed permanently what is now known as a “straight” grain. That is to say, the surface of the leather is lined in the same sort of way as a ploughed field is, but not quite so regularly. The ridges and furrows all run in one direction. Several of Payne’s bindings are bound in straight grain morocco, but judging from his own work, he never got any farther with his graining. At a later time, I think towards the middle of the nineteenth century, it was found out that if the process of straight graining was carried out a second time at right angles to the first operation, the little straight furrows and ridges were broken up, and a surface was produced that consisted of a series of minute hillocks, like a field that has been harrowed, and this is known as a “pin-head” grain. Both these grainings improve the strength of the leather, as it contracts after the wetting and also the wear falls on the tops of the ridges or hillocks before it reaches the body of the leather.