There is not however, any _impossibility_ in the matter. Box wood will bear printing from better than soft lead; and Mr. Blades has demonstrated that types of unhardened lead can be used at an ordinary printing press,--the half of plate IX. B, in the 2d volume of his _Life and Typography of William Caxton_ being printed from such types. Argument however is needless in the presence of a fact, and in the word =Art= here given, each of the three letters is separately engraved on a piece of box-wood, the shanks of the letters being two sizes smaller than those of the _Speculum_, while a portion of the upper part of the capital overhangs its shank; each letter is also perforated and nicked, and is therefore altogether weaker than a letter of the same size as in the _Speculum_ would be. As a proof that it was perfectly possible for such works as the _Speculum_ to have been printed with wooden types, three such letters are as good as three thousand; and letters with the finest strokes most exposed to damage have been purposely selected, in order to demonstrate the fact. The existence in the middle of the Fifteenth century of Guilds or confraternities of trades connected with book-making, in Antwerp, Bruges, and Brussels, amongst whom were included ‘Prenters,’ ‘Letter-,’ and ‘Form-snyders,’ and ‘Beelde-makers;’--Letter and Form and Figure engravers, and those who printed them;--is brought forward as a part of the “vast mass” of so-called “unanswerable evidence,” which sustains the claims of Coster and Haarlem to be the man and the place by whom and where the Art of Typography was invented. “The ‘figure engravers’ (writes Mr. Blades,) were doubtless the artists of the playing cards, the images of saints, and the block-books, then manufactured to a great extent in Holland and Flanders. The term ‘letter engraver’ may have been applied to the sculptor of the legends on the block-books, when not executed by the same artist as the figure itself, but of this there is no evidence, and it seems far from impossible that the term was used to denote artists employed to produce moveable types. The ‘printers’ were doubtless workmen who took the impressions, whether by friction or a press, from the engraved blocks delivered to them; but there is no reason to restrict the meaning of the word, and the same term was from the commencement always applied to printers from moveable types. There is therefore, _primâ facie_, evidence to support the supposition that at a very early period there were workmen in Bruges who employed themselves, albeit in a very rudimentary way, in printing from moveable types.”