“If he embrace the latter opinion, he finds, in the work before him, ample cause to admire the invincible patience, the skill, and the exactness of the artist, who could succeed, not only in giving to the sculptured characters that general uniformity of appearance, which at first occasioned him to consider them as cast type; but even so strict a resemblance between perhaps a dozen specimens of the same letter in the first six lines of a page, as to baffle the exertions of the most correct eye to detect any sensible difference between them, except such as must necessarily occur even in the ordinary method of printing with cast type; either in consequence of one letter happening to have been more used and worse than another, more charged with printing ink, or from an irregularity not unfrequent in ordinary presswork, forced deeper into the paper than the rest.” Having been “conversant with printing” for more than forty years, during thirty-two of which I have been constantly engaged in superintending the passing of works through the press, and in the general management of extensive private and public printing establishments, and having besides a practical knowledge of the arts of wood-engraving, stereotyping, and type-founding, I must own, that the impression made on my mind upon examining the fac-similes of the _Speculum_ given in Wetter’s, Ottley’s, and Humphreys’ books, was, that the separable types used in printing that work were cut in wood, and were not made of cast metal; and the longer I have studied the subject, the more satisfied I am, that Meerman was right in rejecting the opinion of Enschedé,[119] who was strenuously opposed to the idea of wooden types having been used. The eye that has been trained to trace out and instantly detect the most minute differences in the shapes of letters of different founts of the same sized types, from the largest of those ordinarily used in book-work to the smallest employed in newspapers,--to mark out for correction n’s and p’s and q’s that have been turned upside down in order to serve for u’s and d’s and b’s, and _vice versâ_, as well as to reverse turned s’s and o’s--all common enough occurrences with careless compositors, and which only practised eyes can detect;--the eye of a “reader” who has had only a few years’ experience of such work cannot but note the multitudinous differences, the variations in shape externally and internally, of specimens of the same letters which occur in every line of the fac-simile pages of the _Speculum_ given in the books quoted; and which cannot be accounted for by one being more worn than another, or more or less charged with ink, or more deeply pressed into the paper than the rest. Such imperfections are of a totally different character, and produce appearances altogether dissimilar to those which distinguish the different specimens of the same letters in the same lines of the _Speculum_ one from the other.