themselves for the most part with a bare recital of their names . .. We are confronted here once more with that basic function of media --to store and to expedite information. Plainly, to store is to expedite, since what is stored is also more accessible than what has to be gathered. The fact that visual information about flowers and plants cannot be stored verbally also points to the fact that science in the Western world has long been dependent on the visual factor. Nor is this surprising in a literate culture based on the technology of the alphabet, one that reduces even spoken language to a visual mode. As electricity has created multiple non-visual means of storing and retrieving information, not only culture but science also has shifted its entire base and character. For the educator, as well as the philosopher, exact knowledge of what this shift means for learning and the mental process is not necessary. Well before Gutenberg's development of printing from movable types, a great deal of printing on paper by woodcut had been done. Perhaps the most popular form of this kind of block printing of text and image had been in the form of the Biblia Pauperum, or Bibles of the Poor. Printers in this woodcut sense preceded typographic printers, though by just how long a period it is not easy to establish, because these cheap and popular prints, despised by the learned, were not preserved any more than are the comic books of today. The great law of bibliography comes into play in this matter of the printing that precedes Gutenberg: "The more there were, the fewer there are." It applies to many items besides printed matter --to the postage stamp and to the early forms of radio receiving sets. Medieval and Renaissance man experienced little of the separation and speciality among the arts that developed later. The manuscript and the earlier printed books were read aloud, and poetry was sung or intoned. Oratory, music, literature, and