Select the correct text in the passage.
Which word or group of words best helps to clarify the meaning of block printing in the last paragraph?
---
From "The Printing Press" in Great Inventions and Discoveries by Willis Duff Piercy
"Except a living man," says Charles Kingsley, "there is nothing more wonderful than a book—a message to us from the dead from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, amuse us, vivify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers. We ought to reverence books, to look at them as useful and mighty things." Milton calls a good book "the precious life blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life." Cicero likens a room without books to a body without a soul. Ruskin says, "Bread of flour is good, but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book." And Thomas Carlyle exclaims: "Wondrous, indeed, is the virtue of a true book! O thou who art able to write a book, which once in two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name city-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name conqueror or city-burner."
For centuries the traditions, stories, and songs of men were handed down orally from father to son and were preserved only in the memory. The poems of Homer, the great Greek bard, were recited by readers to large audiences, some of them numbering probably twenty thousand. By and by men felt the need of perpetuating their thoughts in some more permanent way than by memory, and there grew up a rude system of writing.
The early Greeks and Romans used for their books tablets of ivory or metal or, more commonly, tablets of wood taken from the beech or fir tree which was then followed by a material called parchment. This was made from the skins of animals, particularly sheep or lambs. About the end of the ninth century or the beginning of the tenth, after Christ, parchment and vellum as material for books gave way to paper. Initially, paper produced was made of cotton, but during the twelfth century it was produced from linen. It is not known who invented linen paper, but its introduction was the first great catalyst to book making. About the beginning of the fifteenth century after Christ, there came over the world an enormous wave of intellectual awakening.
The human intellect began to awake, to stretch itself, to go forth and conquer, which hence brought about the invention of printing. Before this time, ever since man began to record his thoughts, whether on plank, stone, or papyrus, on bark of tree, skin of animal, or tablet of wax or paper, every letter was made by hand. The process was necessarily slow, books were rare and costly, and only the few could have them. But with the advent of a process that would multiply books and make them cheap, learning was made accessible to the legion. Before the invention of printing with movable, metal types, a kind of block printing was used. The words or letters were carved on a block of wood, the block was applied to paper, silk, cloth, or vellum, and thus impressions were made.
---
