It was from these early Block-books, or Donatuses, that Gutenberg, as we learn from the statement of Ulric Zell,--a contemporary, and working printer at Mentz with the original inventors while the art was yet a secret,--derived his idea of printing as at present practised. In the words of Mr. Charles Knight, in his interesting biography of the venerable Caxton, the Father of the Art in England,--“To seize upon the idea, that the text or legend might be composed of separate letters, capable of re-arrangement after the impressions were taken off, so as to be applied without new cutting to other texts and legends, was to secure the principle upon which the printing art depended. It was easy to extend the principle from a few lines to a whole page, and from one page to many, so as to form a book.” Such, according to the almost universally adopted belief, were the successive steps which led to the invention of ~TYPOGRAPHY~. And for nearly a century no one had ventured to doubt that either images of saints, or characters for playing cards, were first printed from engraved wooden blocks, as cheap substitutes for the works of the draftsman and painter;--that these were succeeded by subjects of sacred history with explanatory legends cut in wood, imitative of the art of the illuminator, and the caligraphy of the scribes or professional writers;--that these again were followed by Donatuses;--and that from these Donatuses, printed from solid blocks, Gutenberg obtained his first idea of the Typographic Art.