His “Exercises on Letter Founding” may be best introduced in his own language: “Having shown you the Master Printers Office,” he says, “I account {185} it suitable to proper Method to let you know how the Letter Founder Cuts the Punches, how the Molds are made, the Matrices sunck, and the Letter Cast and Drest. . . . Wherefore the next Exercises shall be (God willing) upon Cutting of Steel Punches.” The minuteness with which he enters into every detail connected with this mysterious art, and his familiarity with the terminology of the craft, prove that Moxon, although he professed to have learned it not from any master, but “of his own genuine inclination,” was an experienced and even enthusiastic punch-cutter. He devotes considerable attention to the tools and gauges necessary for the work, and returns once more to the charge on behalf of geometry as the foundation of typography. Anyone acquainted with the modern practice of punch-cutting, cannot but be struck, on reading the directions laid down in the _Mechanick Exercises_, with the slightness of the change which the manual processes of that art have undergone during the last two centuries. Indeed, allowing for improvements in tools, and the greater variety of gauges, we might almost assert that the punch-cutter of Moxon’s day knew scarcely less than the punch-cutter of our day, with the accumulated experience of two hundred years, could teach him. Moxon’s observations, as in the _Regulæ Trium Ordinum_, apply only to the Roman, Italic and Black-letter, and these he illustrates by a series of plates devised on the same method as in his former work, showing each letter in a magnified form on a square subdivided into forty-two parts, with the proportions for the various parts of each letter minutely laid down. He imagines an objection that it may be deemed impossible in the case of a small letter to divide the square of the body into forty-two equal parts. “But yet,” he says, “it is possible with curious working,” and proceeds, evidently to his own satisfaction, to demonstrate the fact in a very curious way, by suggesting a series of graduations in the rubbing of spaces and points, whereby a thin[342] space may be enlarged by sixths until a series of 42nd parts of each body is arrived at. Impracticable as such a system appears, it is consistently carried out in the enlarged letters which illustrate the _Exercises_. The result is not more successful than that produced in the _Regulæ Trium Ordinum_; and we venture to think that if any proof were needed that geometry is not, and cannot be, the Alpha and Omega of typographical beauty, these reductions into practice of Moxon’s ingenious theories will supply it.