These words themselves, as will also be shown concerning the ear-pictures by which they are represented, reveal in their analysis a story of the deepest interest. In the happy simile quoted by the late Archbishop Trench in his _Study of Words_, they are "fossil history," and, as he adds, "fossil poetry and fossil ethics" also. To cite a few examples, more or less apposite to our subject, "book" is probably from the Anglo-Saxon _bóc_, a "beech," tablets of the bark of that tree being one of the substances on which written characters were inscribed. Parallel to this are the words "library" and "libel," both derived from the Latin _liber_, the inner bark or rind of a tree used for paper; while, as everybody knows, the word "paper" preserves the history of the manufacture of writing material in Egypt from the pith of the papyrus reed, the use of which goes back, as will be shown hereafter, to a high antiquity, and the classic name of which, _biblos_, has been applied to "bible." "Code" is derived from the Latin _codex_, "a tree-trunk"; "letters" comes through the French _lettre_ from the Latin _lino_, _litum_, "to daub" or "besmear," an early mode of writing being the graving of characters on tablets smeared with wax. "Tablet" is the diminutive of "table," which comes from the Latin _tabula_, "a board," and the ancient writing instrument, called a _stylus_, illustrates the passage of language from the concrete to the abstract in its application to the way in which a writer expresses his ideas. We speak of his "style," just as we say "he wields an able pen," this word being derived from the Latin _penna_, "a feather." The phrase _lapsus calami_, "a slip of the pen," preserves record of the use of the reed (Latin _calamus_), which also survives in "quill," from Old English _quylle_, "a reed." But the metal pen has a longer history than was suspected, since Dr. Waldstein has found one, cut and slit like our modern specimens, in a tomb of the third century B.C., at Eretria in the island of Eubœa in the Ægean. "Volume," from Latin _volumen_, "a roll," tells us what was the usual form of books in ancient times, the old form of preservation and custody of legal records surviving in "Rolls of Court," "Master of the Rolls," and so forth. So in "diploma," which, literally, is a paper folded double, from Greek _diploō_, "to fold." Both "diplomacy" and "duplicity" mean "doubling," but the force of the parallel may not be pursued here. Finally--for the list might be extended indefinitely--"parchment" is borrowed from Pergamus, a town in Asia Minor, where skin came into general use, Ptolemy V. (205-185 B.C.), so runs a doubtful story told by Pliny, having prohibited the export of papyrus from Egypt.