282 A Short History of The World of ignorance he denounced ; respect for authority, custom, the sense of the ignorant crowd, and the vain proud unteachableness of our dispositions. Overcome but these, and a world of power would open to men : — " Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, so that great ships suited to river or ocean, guided by one man, may be borne with greater speed than if they were full of men. Likewise cars may be made so that without a draught animal they may be moved cum impetu inosstimabile, as we deem the scythed chariots to have been from which antiquity fought. And flying machines are possible, so that a man may sit in the middle turning some device by which artificial wings may beat the air in the manner of a flying bird." So Roger Bacon wrote, but three more centuries were to elapse before men began any systematic attempts to explore the hidden stores of power and interest he realized so clearly existed beneath the dull surface of human affairs. But the Saracenic world not only gave Christendom the stimulus of its philosophers and alchemists ; it also gave it paper. It is scarcely too much to say that paper made the intellectual revival of Europe possible. Paper originated in China, where its use prob- ably goes back to the second century b.c. In 751 the Chinese made an attack upon the Arab Moslems in Samarkand ; they were re- pulsed, and among the prisoners taken from them were some skilled papermakers, from whom the art was learnt. Arabic paper manu- scripts from the ninth century onward still exist. The manu- facture entered Christendom either through Greece or by the capture of Moorish paper-mills diiring the Christian reconquest of Spain. But under the Christian Spanish the product deteriorated sadly. Good paper was not made in Christian Eiirope until the end of the thirteenth century, and then it was Italy which led the world. Only by the fourteenth century did the manufacture reach Germany, and not until the end of that century was it abundant and cheap enough for the printing of books to be a practicable business proposition. Thereupon printing followed naturally and necessarily, for printing is the most obvious of inventions, and the intellectual life of the world entered upon a new and far more vigorous phase. It ceased to be a httle trickle from mind to mind ; it became a broad flood, in which thousands and presently scores and hundreds of thousands of minds participated. One immediate result of this achievement of printing was the
