According to the statistics of book-production collected with painstaking thoroughness by Panzer, Weller, and Kuczynski, and tabulated by Kapp, the total number of separate works (principally pamphlets, _Flugschriften_) printed in German in the year 1513 was 90; in 1518, 146; in 1520, 571; and in 1523, 944. The aggregate for the ten years is 3113. Of the total for the decade, no less than 600 were printed in Wittenberg, a place which before 1517 had not possessed a printing-press[127]; this is an indication of the immediate effect produced by the Lutheran movement upon the work of the printers. The revolution in publishing methods brought about in connection with the Reformation was not restricted to the introduction of German as a language for popular publications. Of almost equal importance was the change in the form and the price of books, the costly folios and quartos being replaced by comparatively inexpensive twelvemos and sixteenmos, and by far the larger proportion of the writings which exercised the most immediate influence on the thought of the time being issued in the form of pamphlets. These pamphlets, sold in the market-places, along the highways, and from house to house, by pedlars working for gain, and by colporteurs having a missionary purpose, took the place which in modern times is filled by the magazine or weekly paper. Luther recognised at once the importance of the printing-press for the work he had in hand, but he was himself amazed at the extent of the public that he was able to reach when, after 1518, his tracts and sermons came to be printed in German. Up to this time these had been originally issued, according to the prevailing practice, in Latin, and only in part translated into German. It is not easy at this period to understand how the middle and lower classes in Germany had been able, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, to secure so general a proficiency in reading as to be able to profit by the pamphlet literature of the time, but, that a widespread elementary education existed, is evident from the circulation secured for these pamphlets, and from their immediate influence upon opinion and belief. I can but think that the high standard of popular intelligence which rendered possible the comprehensive and general acceptance of the doctrines of the Reformers, doctrines largely made known through printed arguments, may very properly be taken as a limitation upon the rather highly coloured descriptions given by D’Aubigné and some other Protestant historians of the extreme ignorance in which the masses of the people had been left under the ministrations of the Church of Rome.