wood. In Bewick's day the wood used was boxwood and the engraver worked across the grain, and in place of a knife he used a graver.
The design on a wood block is, as are all the designs for metal or lithography, drawn in reverse, because an impression has to be taken on the paper upon which it is printed.
It is not necessary to enter into the early history of wood-cutting. Strong controversies have been waged between savants as to whether it was first employed for religious pictures or for playing-cards. The earliest typographical work containing woodcuts of figures illustrative of the text appeared in the middle of the fifteenth century in Germany. The growth of printing and its universal extension is bound up with the use of woodcuts in early printed volumes, and they held their own up to the last decade of the nineteenth century, when the process block drove them from the field.
All engraving on metal is costly and is inconvenient to print separately, whereas wood blocks can be printed side by side with the letterpress. This gave long life to wood engraving and made it always a formidable rival to all forms of metal engraving.
The Old Masters.—In France a style was practised termed the criblée, or dotted style, from the fact that the block was punctured with holes, which printed white. This method soon gave place to the cutting of ordinary black lines. At first the woodcuts were decorative in quality, as decorative as stencilling. They were simply black lines on a white surface.
