Turning now from type-casting appliances to the early types themselves, we are enabled, thanks to one or two recent discoveries, to form a tolerably good idea as to their appearance and peculiarities. We have already stated that, with regard to the traditional perforated wooden types seen by certain old writers, the probability is that, if these were the genuine relics they professed to be, they were model types used for forming moulds upon, or for impressing into matrices of moist clay or soft lead. We have also considered it possible, in regard to types cast in the primitive sand or clay moulds of the rude school, that to overcome the difficulties incident to irregular height to paper, uneven bodies, and loose locking-up, the expedient may have been attempted of perforating the types and passing a thread or wire through each line, to hold the intractable letters in their place. This, however, is mere conjecture, and whether such types existed or not none of them have survived to our day. Their possessors, as they slowly discovered the secret of the punch, matrix and mould, would show little veneration, we imagine, for these clumsy relics of their ignorance, and value them only as old lead, to be remelted and recast by the newer and better method. But though no relic of these primitive cast types remains, we are happily not without means for forming a judgment respecting some of the earliest types of the more finished school of printers. In 1878, in the bed of the river Saône, near Lyons,[42] opposite the site of one of the famous fifteenth century printing-houses of that city, a number of old types were discovered which there seems reason to believe belonged once to one of those presses, and were used by the early printers of Lyons. They came into the hands of M. Claudin of Paris, {21} the distinguished typographical antiquary, who, after careful examination and inquiry, has satisfied himself as to their antiquity and value as genuine relics of the infancy of the art of printing. [Illustration: 4. _Profile tracings from M. Claudin’s Types. October 1883._]