A French paper makes a calculation to show how marvelously human labor is outrivaled by the mechanical arrangements of the steam press. The paper, “La Patrie,” contains about 4,230 lines: 8,000 copies make 34,560,000 lines. A clerk could write about three lines in a minute; therefore it would require 11,520,000 minutes, or 192,000 hours, for a single clerk to supply 8,000 copies of “La Patrie;” in other words, it would require 192,000 men to supply, by copying, the same amount of paper which the cylinder printing-press supplies in one hour.
What great armies of compositors are at work in the printing-houses of Christendom! What numberless presses by night and by day throw off multitudinous papers, pamphlets, and books, which are scattered to every home, business mart, and travelling conveyance in the land.
At the Great Exhibition one Bible Society alone had specimens of the Word of God printed in one hundred and twenty different languages. And a single religious publishing society of London, as early as 1862, had issued five hundred and seventy-six millions of copies of its publications. But that is only one of many societies of similar character, and moreover, every enlightened nation abounds in book and periodical publishers and booksellers.
Time of the Great Invention.--A First Gift.--The Use of the Alphabet.--A New Era.--Royal Printers.--Knights of Type and Pen.--A Mighty Engine.--Gutenberg’s Dream.--The Press mighty.
If the “undevout astronomer is mad,” what shall be thought of the unbelieving observer of God’s dealings with the human race? If evidences of infinite design appear in the material bodies that people space, can we think that God has stamped his creating, ordering hand less distinctly on the affairs connected with the progress of the souls for whom all things exist? The needle pointing to the pole helps on navigation; it is the servant of the seamen: without it, what would commerce do? But how happened it that the principle of the mariner’s compass was discovered just when in the turmoil of events it would be most useful--when it could suitably and most effectively introduce the old to the new world? How providential, too, the time of the invention of the art of printing! Had it been much earlier, the materials for writing were so scarce that it must have come to naught. Had it been deferred, doubtless many works which we prize as among the most valuable and excellent would have been lost. In less than a half-century from the invention of the wonderful art, the continent of America was discovered by Columbus, in 1492. In less then a century, Copernicus discovered the true theory of the planetary motions; and, shortly after, only a few years intervening, he was succeeded by the three great heralds of Newton,--Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo.