The History of Ink, Including Its Etymology, Chemistry, and Bibliography

We have thus herein attempted the fulfilment of the promise (with which we began) to produce a “History of Ink,”—a thing never before done or even proposed to be done. If not successful in our attempt, we hope that we have at least, in this little book, furnished hints and suggestions on this subject which the learned may employ hereafter when the history of this important material of history shall be undertaken and executed on a larger scale. In view of which possibility, we may, with a pardonable self-gratulation, say,—in the words of Martin Luther,—“We have given to other and higher spirits occasion to reflect.”

But we are loth to leave this subject (which has grown into our affections as we have dwelt upon it) without giving a blow or a kick to one monstrous absurdity which has prevailed among the learned, “falsely so-called,”—from the time when the Jesuits returned from China with their “edifying and curious” tales about the huge antiquity of all the arts and some of the sciences of civilization among the people of what they called the “Celestial Empire,”—a term wholly unknown to the Chinese, in any form or variation of expression.

The simple facts are that—the Chinese derived their knowledge of Ink (of writing with a colored liquid) from Europe. So did they obtain their knowledge of the art of printing, carried to them by Venetian travelers, “overland,” just at the moment before the clumsy engraved wood-blocks were superseded by the moveable types of Gansefleisch or Gutenberg. So was it with the Mariner’s Compass, the manufacture of gunpowder, and all their boasted “inventions,”—among which may be included their calculation of eclipses backward through fabulous cycles of centuries, and the morals of Confucius or Kong-foo-tsee, a mythical personage unmentioned in the history of China until the contents of the New Testament had been made known there,—and that—many ages after the date of his supposed life and death.

But for their derivation and appropriation or theft of the great arts from the West, the Chinese and all Oriental nations, from the Euphrates to the Pacific, including the Japanese, would have remained to this day in the condition in which the Mexicans and Peruvians were found by the Spanish and Italian robbers who first explored the Western Hemisphere, and murdered its inhabitants for their land, and the fruits and the gold and silver of that land.

Whatever arts the Chinese or Japanese or Jesuits may have invented or preserved, the art of TELLING THE TRUTH is evidently, to all of them, one of “THE LOST ARTS,“—lost irretrievably and forever!