For the explanation of many of these blunders it is necessary to bear in mind that in setting up the type the compositor has the various letters arranged in separate divisions of his case and selects them one by one as required. Habit enables him to do this with extreme speed and accuracy; but it will easily be seen that the presence of a wrong letter in a division or a dip into the wrong box may occasion one of these unhappy blemishes. In this manner we find oats rendered ‘cats;’ songs, ‘tongs;’ poets, ‘posts;’ or as once happened in the report of a railway accident, ‘confusions of the limbs’ for ‘contusions of the limbs.’ And by the substitution of _n_ for _h_, a newspaper report was made to state that ‘the people rent the air with their ten thousand _snouts_.’ The blame, however, does not always rest with the compositor. Incorrect spelling and slovenly writing have much to answer for, especially in the case of proper names and quotations from foreign languages. Boerhaave becomes ‘Boershave;’ and _Et tu, Brute!_ ‘Eh, the Brute!’ Authors should remember that the proof-reader is fallible; he is not, as is sometimes expected, a ‘Universal Compendium’ of facts, people, places. If a passage reads clearly and grammatically, although conveying anything but the sense intended, it is not to be wondered at that the error is often undetected until too late. Much surprise was occasioned by Sir Archibald Alison, in his _History of Europe_, including amongst the persons present at the funeral of the Duke of Wellington the name of ‘Sir Peregrine Pickle.’ There can be little doubt that the author had made an unconscious slip, intending to name Sir Peregrine Acton. Sir Thomas Brassey having referred in a speech to the _Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics_, the compositor transformed the title into the ‘Golden Treasury of Soups and Cynics.’ A report in a Manchester paper of a recent dramatic performance mentioned the well-known farce of _No. 1 Round the Corner_ under the amusing and suggestive title of ‘_No One_ Round the Corner.’ Mistakes in punctuation, such as the omission or misplacing of a comma, may cause serious alteration to the sense of a passage. The contract made for lighting the town of Liverpool by wick lamps, during the year 1819, was rendered void by the misplacing of a comma in the advertisements, thus: ‘The lamps at present are about four thousand and fifty, and have in general two spouts each, composed of not less than twenty threads of cotton.’ The contractors would have proceeded to furnish each lamp with the said twenty threads; but this being only half the usual quantity, the Commissioners discovered that the difference arose from the comma following, instead of preceding, the word ‘each.’ In the following instance, it was no doubt a bachelor-compositor who, in setting up the toast, ‘Woman, without her, man would be a savage!’ got the comma in the wrong place, and made the sentence read, ‘Woman, without her man, would be a savage!’