Immediately occurred to me Cæsar's remark upon the writing of the Gauls and the Helvetians in his "Bello Gallico" (i. 29, and vi. 14), "Græcis utuntur literis," though it appears in v. 48 that they were not entirely Greek letters. Cæsar thus points out only a resemblance--and a very true one--as the writing, which does not altogether correspond with any known form of letters, resembles the most, on a cursory view, the Greek writing, such as is found on monuments and the oldest manuscripts, and belongs to the form which is called lapidary. Besides, I formed the opinion afterwards that the writer of the latter part of the book had been a contemporary of Cæsar. The form and the origin of the writing is so minutely and fully described in the first part of the book, as it could not be in any other language. It is very complete, and consists of thirty-four letters, among which are three separate forms of a and u, and two of e, i, y, and o, besides four pairs of double consonants--ng, th, ks, and gs. The ng, which as a nasal sound has no particular mark in any other Western language, is an indivisible conjunction; the th is soft, as in English, and is sometimes replaced by d; the gs is seldom met with--I believe only in the word segse, to say, in modern Fries sidse, pronounced sisze. The paper, of large quarto size, is made of cotton, not very thick, without water-mark or maker's mark, made upon a frame or wire-web, with not very broad perpendicular lines. An introductory letter gives the year 1256 as that in which this manuscript was written by Hiddo overa Linda on foreign paper. Consequently it must have come from Spain, where the Arabs brought into the market paper manufactured from cotton. On this subject, W. Wattenbach writes in his "Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter" (Leipzig, 1871), s. 93:-- "The manufacture of paper from cotton must have been in use among the Chinese from very remote times, and must have become known to the Arabs by the conquest of Samarcand about the year 704. In Damascus this manufacture was an important branch of industry, for which reason it was called Charta Damascena. By the Arabians this art was brought to the Greeks. It is asserted that Greek manuscripts of the tenth century written upon cotton paper exist, and that in the thirteenth century it was much more used than parchment. To distinguish it from Egyptian paper it was called Charta bombicina, gossypina, cuttunea, xylina. A distinction from linen paper was not yet necessary. In the manufacture of the cotton paper raw cotton was originally used. We first find paper from rags mentioned by Petrus Clusiacensis (1122-50). "The Spaniards and the Italians learned the manufacture of this paper from the Arabians. The most celebrated factories were at Jativa, Valencia, Toledo, besides Fabriano in the March of Ancona." [1]