Many other woodcuts of the same character have been discovered, which are believed to have been engraved in the first half of the fifteenth century. In the Imperial Library at Vienna there is a print of _St. Sebastian_, bearing the date 1437, which was found in the monastery of St. Blaise in the Black Forest. 'Having visited,' says Herr Heinecken, 'in my last tour a great many convents in Franconia, Suabia, Bavaria, and in the Austrian States, I everywhere discovered in their libraries many of these kinds of figures engraved on wood. They were usually pasted either at the beginning or the end of old volumes of the fifteenth century. These facts have confirmed me in my opinion that the next step of the {10} engraver on wood, after playing-cards, was to engrave figures of Saints, which, being distributed and lost among the laity, were in part preserved by the monks, who pasted them into the earliest printed books with which their libraries were furnished.' Herr Heinecken possessed more than a hundred of these pictures of Saints. There can be little doubt they were produced in the monasteries and convents, and distributed to the people, especially in the processions of the Church, as aids to devotion. Among the thousands of monks who lived in the fifteenth century there must have been many men who, like Fra Angelico, were gifted with sufficient artistic taste to enable them to draw and engrave such a picture as the St. Christopher. * * * * * {11} CHAPTER II _ON THE BLOCK BOOKS OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY_ In the first half of the fifteenth century, before the invention of printing by means of movable type, many books were produced in which the woodcuts and the text were engraved on the same page, or sometimes the text was on one page and the woodcut opposite. They were impressed on one side only of the paper, and the two blank pages were often pasted together. They are usually called Block Books. Many of the cuts are more than ten inches in height by eight inches in width, and were probably cut with a knife upon smoothly planed planks of the pear-tree, or other fine-grained wood, or possibly some were engraved upon soft metal. The most celebrated of them are: I. Biblia Pauperum.--Bible of the Poor. II. Apocalypsis Sancti Johnannis.--Visions of St. John. III. Ars Moriendi.--The Art of Dying. IV. Canticum Canticorum.--Solomon's Song. V. Ars Memorandi.--The Art of Remembering. VI. Liber Regum.--Book of Kings. VII. Temptationes Daemonis.--Temptations of a Demon. VIII. Endkrist (only known copy in the Spencer Library). IX. Quindecim Signa.--The Fifteen Signs. X. De Generatione Christi.--Of the Genealogy of Christ. XI. Mirabilia Romae.--The Wonders of Rome. XII. Speculum Humanae Salvationis.--Mirror of Salvation. XIII. Die Kunst Ciromantia.--The Art of Chiromancy. XIV. Confessionale.--Of the Confessional. XV. Symbolum Apostolicum.--Symbols of the Apostles.