He has found, as Meerman did before him, that one Lawrence Janszoon was living in Harlem between 1420 and 1436, and that his name occurs within that period as custos or warden of St. Bavon’s church. As he is never called “Coster,” a name acquired by the family, according to Junius, in consequence of the office which they enjoyed by hereditary right, the identity of Lawrence Janszoon and Lawrence Coster is by no means clearly established; and even if it were, the sole evidence of his having been a printer rests on the testimony of Cornelius, who was scarcely ten years old when Lawrence Janszoon died. The correctness of Cornelius’s narrative is questioned both by Meerman and Koning whenever his statements do not accord with their theory, and yet they require others to believe the most incredible of his assertions. They themselves throw doubts on the evidence of their own witness, and yet require their opponents to receive as true his deposition on the most important point in dispute---that Coster invented typography previous to 1441,--a point on which he is positively contradicted by more than twenty authors who wrote previous to 1500; and negatively by the silence of Coster’s contemporaries. Supposing that the account of Cornelius had been published in 1488 instead of 1588, it would be of very little weight unless corroborated by the testimony of others who must have been as well aware of Coster’s invention as himself; for the silence of contemporary writers on the subject of an important invention or memorable event, will always be of greater negative authority than the unsupported assertion of an individual who when an old man professes to relate what he had heard and seen when a boy. If therefore the uncorroborated testimony of Cornelius would be so little worth, even if published in 1488, of what value can it be printed in 1588, in the name of a person who was then dead, and who could not be called on to explain the discrepancies of his part of the narrative? Whatever might be the original value of Cornelius’s testimony, it is deteriorated by the channel through which it descends to us. He told it to a boy, who, when an old man, told it to another boy, who when nearly sixty years old inserts it in a book which he is writing, but which is not printed until twelve years after his death.