THE SILK MANUFACTURE-- 1. John Lombe, 221 2. William Lee, 225 3. Joseph Marie Jacquard, 227 THE POTTER'S ART-- 1. Luca Della Robbia, 237 2. Bernard Palissy, 241 3. Josiah Wedgwood, 250 THE MINER'S SAFETY LAMP-- 1. Sir Humphrey Davy, 263 2. George Stephenson's Lamp, 275 PENNY POSTAGE-- 1. Sir Rowland Hill, 279 2. New Departments of the Postal System, 292 THE OVERLAND ROUTE-- 1. Lieutenant Waghorn, 299 2. The Suez Canal, 309 The Art of Printing. I.--JOHN GUTENBERG. II.--WILLIAM CAXTON. III.--THE PRINTING MACHINE. The Art of Printing. "A creature he called to wait on his will, Half iron, half vapour--a dread to behold-- Which evermore panted, and evermore rolled, And uttered his words a millionfold. Forth sprung they in air, down raining in dew, And men fed upon them, and mighty they grew." LEIGH HUNT, _Sword and Pen_. I.--JOHN GUTENBERG. Some Dutch writers, inspired by a not unnatural feeling of patriotism, have endeavoured to claim the honour of inventing the Art of Printing for a countryman of their own, Laurence Coster of Haarlem. Their sole reliance, however, is upon the statements of one Hadrian Junius, who was born at Horn, in North Holland, in 1511. About 1575 he wrote a work, entitled "Batavia," in which the account of Coster first appeared. And, as an unimpeachable authority has remarked, almost every succeeding advocate of Coster's pretensions has taken the liberty of altering, amplifying, or contradicting the account of Junius, according as it might suit his own line of argument; but not one of them has succeeded in producing a solitary fact in confirmation of it. The accounts which are given of Coster's discovery by Junius and his successors present many contradictory features. Thus Junius says: "Walking in a neighbouring wood, as citizens are accustomed to do after dinner and on holidays, he began to cut letters of beech-bark, with which, for amusement--the letters being inverted as on a seal--he impressed short sentences on paper for the children of his son-in-law." A later writer, Scriverius, is more imaginative: "Coster," he says, "walking in the wood, picked up a small bough of a beech, or rather of an oak-tree, blown off by the wind; and after amusing himself with cutting some letters on it, wrapped it up in paper, and afterwards laid himself down to sleep. When he awoke, he perceived that the paper, by a shower of rain or some accident having got moist, had received an impression from