All the earlier cuts were made, commonly on pear wood, on the longitudinal face of the wood, in technical language "on the plank," and seemingly, in many instances, were made from drawings in ink. By cutting on the plank, the craftsmen were enabled to make large blocks, but were prohibited from doing anything more than relatively simple and straightforward work. Such blocks are known as wood cuts; wood engravings were not made until the possibilities of a hard wood like box carved upon the transverse section were discovered at a much later date. This is, strictly speaking, wood engraving, an art which almost entirely, if not quite, superseded the older craft, on account of its great possibilities; indeed, wood engravers imitated metal engraving so closely as to deceive many. But such work was enormously laborious; for instance, in the case of a fishing net, if the string were to be printed black, the engraver would have to cut out hundreds of small diamond-shaped pieces of wood in order that the string of the net should be in relief. But few artists would do this of their own free will, and generally such laborious work will only be found in wood-engravings which were intended for the reproduction of ink drawings or other kinds of pictures where the lines, shading, etc., had to be faithfully copied. This point may be illustrated by the accompanying cut (Fig. 2), which was made by my friend Mr. Geoffrey Oliver, who at the time was totally uninstructed in the art and knew nothing of its literature. It will be seen that he, quite unconsciously, treated his wood in the same way as an engraver would his metal; the result, of course, is just the opposite to metal engraving since the printing of the wood block is the reverse to intaglio. [Illustration: Fig. 2.] In fact, the cut illustrates the three fundamentals of wood engraving; the white line made by cutting out the wood so that no impression will be obtained when printed; the white space which is similarly obtained; and the black space, which is made by leaving the wood untouched. It was, however, necessary to employ the black line, otherwise the tape with which the two men--the artist and his father--are measuring the trunk of the tree would be invisible where it crosses the sky. In a word, the little picture illustrates very nicely the legitimate use of wood in the graphic arts. As already remarked, the majority of the earlier wood cuts and engravings are reproductions of line drawings, so that although we may admire and often marvel at the technical ability of the engraver, the credit for what artistic merit such illustrations may possess must, in the majority of cases, go to the draughtsman. The work of the earlier wood engravers may be conveniently studied in _A Lyttel Booke of Nonsense_, by R. D., London, 1912. (See also the relevant works cited under Literature, p. 94).