Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum

You bang it hard so that you get a kind of raised negative of the original inscription.

And in Berlin, which is the home of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, which is a collection of all Latin inscriptions, you have all these squeezes, piles and piles and piles of these squeezes.

The equivalent in many of the natural sciences was not to make drawings, but to make photographs, even though photographs were often much harder to use because they included a lot of excess detail that you didn't really need, because of the worries about subjective errors.

So I think, you know, you can see an absolutely parallel evolution in this regard in what we might call the rise of objectivity as a key epistemic virtue in the 19th century, not only in the natural sciences, but also in at least philology.