Papyrus is a very durable substance, made of the innermost pellicles of the stalk, glued together transversely, with the glutinous water of the Nile.  It was for many centuries the great staple of Egypt, and was exported in large quantities to almost every part of Europe and Asia, but never, it would appear, to England or Germany.  After the seventh century its use was gradually superseded by the introduction of parchment; and before the end of the twelfth century it had gone generally out of use.  From “papyrus” the name of “paper,” which, with slight variations, is common to many languages, is no doubt derived.

Parchment and vellum—­which are made from the skin of animals, the former from sheep or goat, the latter from calf, both prepared with lime—­were in use at a very early period, long before their accredited introduction.  It has been by some supposed that Eumenes, King of Pergamus, who lived about B.C. 190, was the inventor of parchment; but it was known much earlier, as may be seen by several references to it in the Bible (Isaiah, viii. i; Jeremiah, xxxvi. 2; Ezekiel, xi. 9).  It is, however, very probable that it may have been brought to perfection at Pergamus, as it was one of the principal articles of commerce of that kingdom.

Parchment, in early times, was not only expensive, but often very difficult to procure; whence arose the practice of erasing old writing from it, and engrossing it a second time.  Such manuscripts are called “palimpsests.”  Modern art has found the means of discharging the more recent ink, and thus restoring the original writing, by which means we have recovered many valuable pieces, particularly Cicero’s lost book, de Republica and some fragments of his Orations.

The most ancient manuscripts, both on papyrus and parchment, were kept in rolls, called in Latin volumina, whence our English word “volume.”  Chinese paper, made from the bark of the bamboo, the mulberry, or the khu-ku tree, and so extremely thin that it can only be used on one side, is supposed to have been invented fifty years before the Christian era or earlier.  Chinese rice-paper is made from the stems of the bread-fruit tree, cut into slices and pressed.  The skins of all kinds of animals are used—­among them the African skin, of a brown color, upon which the Hebrew Pentateuch and service-books used in the Jewish synagogues were formerly written.  Silk-paper was prepared for the most part in Spain and its colonies, but was never brought to much perfection.  Asbestos, a fibrous mineral, was made into paper, tolerably light and pliant, which, being incombustible, was denominated “eternal paper.”  Herodotus tells us that cloth was made of asbestos by the Egyptians; and Pliny mentions napkins made of it in A.D. 74.  We know by tradition that the intestines of a serpent served for Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; and that the Koran was written in part on shoulder-bones of mutton, kept in a domestic chest by one of Mahomet’s wives.