All honour to the memory of Pi-ching, the Chinese blacksmith! One might almost be tempted to suppose, did we but believe in the doctrine of metempsychosis, that after a lapse of 400 years, disgusted at the neglect of his invention in the East, his spirit migrated to the West, and that in Gutenberg he was permitted to be born again. A like spirit animated them both, and to the end of time their labours will live and their memories be blest. The account given in the foregoing description of the method of composing his types used by Pi-ching, is not very dissimilar to that said to have been adopted by the first Typographers of the Western World. Frames, or coffins, were made of planks of wood, in which rectangular hollows were cut the size of the pages to be printed; and in these the types, after having been strung together, were placed in horizontal lines, the ends of the lines and the bottoms of the pages being tightly wedged in, to prevent slips and damage while on the press. All works printed during the first few years after the invention of Typography, were of the size of large or small folio. The latter was what is now-a-days called quarto, from the sheets being folded into four;--then, for the smaller size, whole sheets were cut into two, on each of which two pages were printed, in order to suit the presses, and the stocks of type the printers possessed. These sheets, or half sheets, were printed in sections of 3, 4, or 5, called ternions, quaternions, and quinternions. On the backs of these sections strips of parchment were sometimes pasted, to guard against tears when the sheets were stitched together by the book-binder. The first and third pages so printed were called those on the _recto_ of the sheet, the second and fourth those on the _verso_. A quaternion consisted of eight formes; the first, containing pages 1 and 16, and the second 2 and 15, formed the outer sheet; the next sheet consisted of pages 3 and 14, 4 and 13, the third and fourth formes; the third sheet consisted of pages 5 and 12, 6 and 11, the fifth and sixth formes; the fourth sheet consisted of pages 7 and 10, 8 and 9, the seventh and eighth formes; the next quaternion commenced with pages 17 and 32, and so on. When all the formes were printed, the sheets of which the quaternion consisted were folded one inside the other, the pages then reading regularly on from the first to the sixteenth. So long as books represented fac-similes of manuscripts,--which was the object originally aimed at,--to print in this way was a matter easily accomplished. But as the new art drove out the old, and scribes turned compositors and pressmen, and manuscripts came to be carelessly written, this could no longer be done. Larger founts of type then became necessary, to enable the printer to complete the whole number of pages contained in the section; and to avoid this necessity as much as possible, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos would be resorted to, a single sheet