Leaving the Colophon in its bibliographical aspects to the able hand by which these are about to be treated, it may not be amiss to preface Mr. Pollard’s researches by a brief inquiry into the origin and significance of the term itself, and the reason why the colophon for so long performed the office of the title-page. _Colophon_ originally meant the head or summit of anything. It is clearly cognate with κορυφή, but is a word of far less importance, for while thirteen derivatives from κορυφή are given in Liddell and Scott’s Dictionary, κολοφών has not one. The former word is continually used by Homer; the latter is first met with in Plato, and then and afterwards only in a figurative sense. Yet it is clear that the word must from the first have borne the signification of “summit” or “crest,” for such is the position of the city of Colophon, which must have derived its name from its elevation, just as a modern house may be called “Hilltop.” Names of this kind, if not given at the first, are rarely given at all; we must suppose, then, that _colophon_ was a recognized Greek word for “summit” when the city was founded about the tenth century B.C., according to Strabo by a Pylian colony, though this seems difficult to reconcile with the fact of Colophon being an Ionian city. In any case, the word has long survived the place. According to the information supplied by the New English Dictionary, _colophon_ made a brief appearance in English, in the first half of the seventeenth century, in its secondary classical sense of a “finishing stroke” or “crowning touch,” being used thus in Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,” and again in 1635 by John Swan, who writes in his “Speculum Mundi” of how God “comes to the Creation of Man and makes him the colophon or conclusion of all things else.” Of the use of the word _colophon_ in the particular significance elucidated in this essay—the end or ultimate paragraph of a book or manuscript—the earliest example quoted in the New English Dictionary is from Warton’s “History of English Poetry,” published in 1774. A quarter of a century before this it is found as a term needing no explanation in the first edition of the “Typographical Antiquities” of Joseph Ames, published in 1749. How much older it is than this cannot lightly be determined. The bibliographical use appears to be unknown to the Greek and Latin lexicographers, medieval as well as classical. Pending further investigation, it seems not unlikely that it may have been developed out of the secondary classical sense already mentioned sometime during the seventeenth century, when the interest in bibliography which was then beginning to be felt would naturally call into existence new terms of art. The Latin word _subscriptio_, which is used in a not very dissimilar sense, could hardly have been modernized without ambiguity. The Greek κορωνις, used for a flourish at the end of a manuscript, had not entered into any modern language.