Though the Speculum from the time of the publication of Junius’s work[II-76] had been confidently claimed for Coster, yet no writer, either for or against him, appears to have particularly directed his attention to the manner in which the work was executed before Fournier, who in 1758, in a dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Art of Wood-engraving,[II-77] first published some particulars respecting the work in question, which induced Meerman and Heineken to speculate on the priority of the different editions. Mr. Ottley, however, has proved, in a manner which carries with it the certainty of mathematical demonstration, that the conjectures of both the latter writers respecting the priority of the editions of the Speculum are absolutely erroneous. To elicit the truth does not, with respect to this work, seem to have been the object of those two writers. Both had espoused theories on its origin without much inquiry with respect to facts, and each presumed that edition to be the first which seemed most likely to support his own speculations. [Footnote II-76: The “Batavia” or Junius, in which the name of Lawrence Coster first appears as a printer, was published in 1588.] [Footnote II-77: Dissertation sur l’Origine et les Progrès de l’Art de Graver en Bois. Par M. Fournier le Jeune, 8vo. Paris, 1758.] Heineken, who assumed that the work was of German origin, insisted that the _first_ edition was that in which the text is printed partly from moveable types and partly from letters engraved on wood-blocks, and that the Dutch editions were executed subsequently in the Low Countries. The Latin edition with the text entirely printed from moveable types he is pleased to denominate the second, and to assert, contrary to the evidence which the work itself affords, that the type resembles that of Faust and Scheffer, and that the cuts in this _second_ Latin edition, as he erroneously calls it, are coarser and not so sharp as those in the Latin edition which he supposes to be the first.