the art or process of producing the extremely thin leaves of gold used in gilding. The gold which is beaten into leaf is almost pure metal, which has been melted at a greater temperature than fusibility requires. This extra heat gives the gold a greater malleability. It is cast into bars or flat ingots and sent to the gold beater in that form. The workman rolls it into a long, thin ribbon about 2 1/2 inches wide and then cuts the ribbon into squares. These squares are placed between sheets of peculiar paper, known as "French" paper. It looks like exceedingly close-grained oil paper, and each sheet is about five inches square. Three hundred sheets are piled on one another, and a square of gold is laid on the paper between each two sheets. This forms a book, or, as the gold beaters call it, a cutch. The gold beater slips bands of parchment over the cutch, binding all the leaves with the gold squares between them into a solid block. The cutch is laid on a block of stone, which has been faced up square, and with a twenty-pound cast-iron hammer the gold beater begins to flatten out the gold. The hammer falls on the center of the cutch for a time, thus driving the gold out. The cutch is beaten until the gold has expanded to the size of the sheets of French paper. Each sheet of gold is then removed and cut into four squares, so that each sheet is evenly squared. The leaves of gold are cut with a filling wagon, which consists of two pieces of sharp-edged reed or bamboo, set in a frame so that the parallel cutting edges will divide the leaf into the proper size in one cut. The leaf is cut on a soft piece of leather, so that steel knives cannot be used. The leaf is handled with pincers made of boxwood. The quartered sheets are laid in the shoder, which is like the cutch, except that the leaves are gold beaters' skin. About 1000 of the gold squares are placed in the shoder, and this pile is beaten with a twelve-pound hammer for an hour. Again the leaves are cut into quarters and placed in the mold, which, like the shoder, is made up of gold beaters' skin, and the hammer pounds it for nearly seven hours, until the gold is spread out to the size of the mold. The leaves are then ready to be cut into squares 3 3/8 inches on a side and laid in books, 25 leaves to each book, 20 books to a pack, so that a pack contains 500 sheets of gold leaf. Dentists use gold leaf for filling teeth because gold will weld into a solid mass when cold. The dentist's gold leaf is not put through the shoder and mold, but is taken from the cutch, as they use a heavier leaf than gilders, bookbinders and sign painters. Silver and aluminum leaf are also important products and are made in the same way. Archaeologists have found gold leaf on jars and other household utensils that were made 2000 years B. C. The art was well known in the time of Homer and Pliny. African travelers have found natives who were quite expert in hammering gold into fine sheets.