usually made of a reed; and the characters were _painted_ rather than written, the ink rather resembling paint or varnish than our thin liquor. As they rarely wrote in books, it was not necessary that the page should dry speedily, or be dried by means of sand and blotting-paper, in order to prevent the loss of time, and that the penman might turn over the leaf immediately; the loose sheets or leaves, on the contrary, which were only to be bound up when the whole was completed, were left to dry slowly, so that the pools of ink which formed the letters, stood long on the surface of the parchment; and that part of the fluid which was of a penetrating nature was gradually absorbed, and sunk deeply into the substance of the skin, so as to preserve to us—if we be not wanting to ourselves in diligence—many precious relics of ancient lore. The restoration of the original writing in a palimpsest manuscript will be best explained by referring to one of the many kinds of sympathetic ink, which is in truth, making common ink _ex post facto_, or uniting the ingredients of which it is composed, after the fact of writing. If we write with water in which copperas has been dissolved, the letters will be invisible; but when the paper has been washed over with an infusion of galls, they will appear gradually, and will in time become tolerably legible; the ink being thus formed upon the paper, although much less perfectly, than in the ordinary maceration.” Little or nothing can be added to the full and elaborate history of ancient and modern inks which is contained in this extract,—so thorough and complete in its analysis of the subject, and so clear in its distinct statements of the results of investigations in which some of the most acute minds of Europe have long been successfully employed, that we will not linger upon it with mere verbal criticism. We can not present a more striking illustration of the change in the composition of inks about the time of the invention of the art of printing, than is furnished by the annexed fac-simile of a page in the BIBLIA PAUPERUM, (“Bible for poor folks,”) the oldest printed book in the world. This extraordinary book is of uncertain date. (No printed book has a date prior to 1457.) There are, as we believe, only two copies of it in America, one in the possession of JAMES LENOX, of New-York,—the other in the ASTOR LIBRARY.