Physical and Mental Welfare

Wanganui Chronicle, 1 November 1946, Page 7

Physical and Mental Welfare

Civilisation and the Pursuit of Knowlege (No. 9).

(By SIR RICHARD GREGORY, BART., F.R.S.)

The use oi movable type was first introduced by a Chinese alchemist and inventor, Pj Sheng, in the eleventh century. He used type made of baked clay and experimented also with wooden type. A later improvement, made in China was to use tin for the movable type. Early in the fourteenth century movable types were made in Europe, and these were of wood, tin, and also lead; but the modern art of typography may be said to have begun when in 1454 Johann Gutenberg issued from his printing press at Mainz, books printed from types cast in a mould. THE BIRTH OF THE BOOK. From the cultural point of view, the value of the invention was in the extension of opportunities of acquiring knowledge through book-learning. There were literary works and libraries in Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, and China, in very early times; but each of them had to be written separately by hand. A book is a collection of scripts joined together to form an organic whole so as to be portable. The first books may thus be said to be those written on papyrus in ancient Egypt. Several rolls of this kind, with columns of hieratic writing done about 2500 8.C., have been found in tombs and are preserved in national museums. They are samples of many early Egyptian writings of a didactic and moral character, apart from religious spells and praises of the divine. ANCIENT SCHOOL BOOKS. Most of this secular and sacred literature, preserved on rolls of papyri, was made for school use by young scholar-scribes. There were wonder-tales, romances, humorous and gruesome stories, moral admonitions, types of worldly wisdom, and rules of devotional conduct towards divine influences in the East, five thousand years ago, as characteristic of human life and its spirit as the literature of classical and modern times.

BOOKS AND UTILISATION. The invention of mechanical printing, and the use of paper instead of papyrus, made it possible to produce the many millions of books now in libraries and for the knowledge and wisdom of all peoples to be distributed throughout the civilised world. It is in the extension of this intellectual Influence and the continuous development of processes of reproduction that the art of printing has reached the high position as a cultural force which it occupies to-day. THE PRESS. In so far as art, literature, and music are expressions of the human spirit as well as reactions to conditions of life, any agency which multiplies their points of contact may justly be said to aid the progress of the race by expanding the. outlook. This is what was done when printing presses converted the small corps of transcribers into a great mechanised force in the front line of civilisation. The advance was in apparatus of manifolding literary compositions and thus to give wider range to the light of the torch of learning. BROADCASTING. The value of devices for reproducing words and sounds, written or spoken, lies, therefore, in the increased contacts between human minds and the measure of truth attained in the reproduction. This has reached a high degree of perfection through the combination of mathematical theory and physical- experiment; with the result that broadcasting truly brought about a condition when "their sounds went out into all the earth and their words unto the end of the world." (To be continued). Presidential address of Sir Richard Gregory, Bart., F.R.S., to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, London, July 20, 1946.