It is the conclusion now accepted generally that the Chinese made and used paper for writing purposes from a remote period of the past--from before the beginning of the Christian Era. "The Chinese are credited with the discovery of the art of paper-making by the use of fibers reduced in water to a pulp. Their raw materials were the inner bark of the mulberry tree, bamboo, rice straw, rags, etc."[29] Paper was distinguished from the papyrus in that the substances from which it was made were not used in their natural state, as the papyrus was, but were manufactured from the raw material which was first reduced to a pulp, then disposed in sheets, and subsequently finished for use. In lapse of time many different kinds of substances were employed as raw material or the basis of the finished product. At the Paris Exhibition in 1889, a paper-maker showed more than sixty webs, or rolls, of paper, each made from a different vegetable fibre: and sample-books have been published which were composed of several hundred leaves, all of different fibre.[30] It is somewhat the "irony of fate" that no account of the origin of paper has been reliably recorded. Much of the reputed history of the art, or the invention, is only conjectural. The fact is that, however remote the time and place of its beginning, paper first became available to the world of letters in the eighth century. The Arabs, having acquired the art of making it from China (through Chinese prisoners, it is said) brought its manufacture into Arabia in the eighth century and, later, carried it into Europe by way of northern Africa. The comparatively large number of Arab manuscripts, preserved from the ninth century, is evidence of the extent to which paper was adopted and used for their literary, scientific, and religious records. The Moors by their conquest of Spain in the eighth century brought their civilization and its benefits into western Europe and, at a later time--at about the twelfth century--introduced the manufacture of paper therein. The industry spread, later, from Spain into Italy and Sicily, and came eventually into the hands of the Christians, under whose less skillful manipulations it suffered deterioration in quality. At a still later date, its manufacture extended into southern and western Germany and into the Netherlands, England, and France.