should be added in positive body colour; but the person--perhaps the engraver himself--whose business it was to add the finishing touches to the impression, has neglected to light Joseph’s candle.[V-3] [Footnote V-2: This print is one of the valuable collection left to the Museum by the Rev. C. M. Cracherode, and the following remark in that gentleman’s writing is inserted on the opposite page of the folio in which it is preserved: “The Presepe is a plain proof that printing in chiaro-scuro was known before the time of Ugo da Carpi, who is erroneously reputed the inventor of this art at the beginning of the sixteenth century.” The print in question is certainly not a proof of the art of engraving in chiaro-scuro; and Mr. Ottley has added the following correction in pencil: “But the white here is put on with a pencil, and not left in printing, as it would have been if the tint had been added by a wooden block after the copper-plate had been printed.”] [Footnote V-3: Bartsch describes this print in his Peintre-Graveur, tom. vi. p. 364, No. 4; but he takes no notice of Joseph holding a candle, nor of its wanting a light.] Towards the latter end of the fifteenth century,[V-4] a practice was introduced by the German wood engravers of dotting the dark parts of their subjects with white, more especially in cuts where the figures were intended to appear light upon a dark ground; and about the beginning of the sixteenth, this mode of “killing the black,” as it is technically termed, was very generally prevalent among the French wood engravers, who, as well as the Germans and Dutch, continued to practise it till about 1520, when it was almost wholly superseded by cross-hatching; a mode of producing shade which had been much practised by the German engravers who worked from the drawings of Durer, Cranach, and Burgmair, and which about that time seems to have been generally adopted in all countries where the art had made any progress. The two following cuts, which are from an edition of “Heures à l’Usaige de Chartres,” printed at Paris by Simon Vostre, about 1502, are examples of this mode of diminishing the effects of a ground which would otherwise be entirely black. Books printed in France between 1500 and 1520 afford the most numerous instances of dark backgrounds dotted with white. In many cuts executed about the latter period the dots are of larger size and more numerous in proportion to the black, and they evidently have been produced by means of a lozenge-pointed tool, in imitation of cross-hatching. [Footnote V-4: Some single cuts executed in this manner are supposed to be at least as old as the year 1450. The earliest that I have noticed in a book occur in a Life of Christ printed at Cologne about 1485.]