পাতা:সংবাদপত্রে সেকালের কথা দ্বিতীয় খণ্ড.djvu/৭৮০

%8e: মংবাদ পত্রে লোকালের কথা that they carry forward the work of type-casting, and even of cutting the matrices, with a degree of accuracy which would not disgrace European artists. These have cast for us two or three founts of Bengali ; and we are now employing them in casting a fount on a construction which bids fair to diminish the expense of paper, and the size of the book at least one-fourth, without affecting the legibility of the character.”-Memoir Relative to the Translations, 1807, as quoted by Geo. Smith, p. 181. বাংলা ছাপার হরফের জন্মকথা-প্রসঙ্গে ১৮৩৪ সনের সেপ্টেম্বর মাসের “দি ক্যালকাটা খ্ৰীষ্টান অবজার্ভার’ পত্রে যাঙ্গ লিখিত হয়, এখানে তাহা উদ্ধত করিলে অপ্রাসঙ্গিক হইবে না :– “India had never seen printing in her own indigenous characters, till about twelve years before the arrival of the brethren Carey and Thomas in India. She was indebted for its existence to the ingenuity and unceasing efforts of Lieut. Wilkins, then a young man in the Bengal army, and now, the justly celebrated Dr. Wilkins. The attachment of this young man to Indian literature is testified both by Sir William Jones and by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, Esq. the author of the first and the most elegant Grammar of the Bengalee language, which has yet appeared. This was printed at Hooghly, in 1784, with the first complete fount of Bengalee types Lieutenant Wilkins fabricated, respecting which, Mr. Halhed, then in the Civil Service, testifies in his preface, that in cutting this fount, Lieut. Wilkins performed all the various operations of the type founder, from cutting the punches with his own hand, to bringing them complete from the foundery. 宗 כh: 次 ...Suffice it to say, that when Mr. Ward had arrived from England with the printing apparatus, Bengalee types were still wanting. If written characters had been sent home to form the exemplar of a fount of Bengalee types, as Carey and Thomas had contemplated ; it had been found that the cutting of 600 punches at eighteen shillings each, the price in England for cutting the smallest Roman character, rendered it impossible for Fuller and his associates to advance the sum of more than five hundred pounds sterling, for merely cutting a Bengalee fount of types. But what appeared beyond the means of both Carey in India, and Fuller and his companions at home, providence was pleased to supply in a way quite unexpected. About two months after