* * * * * Putting aside, therefore, as improbable, and not proved, the two theories of {9} engraved movable types, the question arises, Did typography, like her patron goddess, spring fully armed from the brain of her inventor? in other words, did men pass at a single stride from xylography to the perfect typography of the punch, the matrix, and the mould? or are we still to seek for an intermediate stage in some ruder and more primitive process of production? To this question we cannot offer a better reply than that contained in the following passage from Mr. Blades’s admirable life of Caxton.[18] “The examination of many specimens,” he observes, “has led me to conclude that two schools of typography existed together . . . The ruder consisted of those printers who practised their art in Holland and the Low Countries, . . . and who, by degrees only, adopted the better and more perfect methods of the . . . school founded in Germany by the celebrated trio, Gutenberg, Fust, and Schoeffer.” It is impossible, we think, to resist the conclusion that all the earlier works of typography were the impression of cast metal types; but that the methods of casting employed were not always those of matured letter-founding, seems to us not only probable, but evident, from a study of the works themselves. Mr. Theo. De Vinne, in his able treatise on the invention of printing,[19] speaking with the authority of a practical typographer, insists that the key to that invention is to be found, not in the press nor in the movable types, but in the adjustable type-mould, upon which, he argues, the existence of typography depends. While not prepared to go as far as Mr. De Vinne on this point, and still content to regard the invention of movable types as the real key to the invention of typography proper, we find in the mould not only the culminating achievement of the inventor, but also the key to the distinction between the two schools of early typography to which we have alluded. The adjustable mould was undoubtedly the goal of the discovery, and those who reached it at once were the advanced typographers of the Mentz press. Those who groped after it through clumsy and tedious by-ways were the rude artists of the _Donatus_ and _Speculum_. In considering the primitive modes of type-casting, it must be frankly admitted that the inquirer stands in a field of pure conjecture. He has only negative evidence to assure him that such primitive modes undoubtedly did exist, and he searches in vain for any direct clue as to the nature and details of those methods. We shall briefly refer to one or two theories which have been propounded, all with more or less of plausibility.