“Those fatal unhistorical wooden types! Wetter spent nearly the amount of ten shillings on having a number of letters made of the wood of a pear tree, only to please Trithemius, Bergellanus, and Faust of Aschaffenburg, the first two, falsifiers of history in good, the last in bad, faith. His letters, although tied with string, did not remain in the line, but made naughty caprioles. The supposition--that by these few dancing lines the possibility is demonstrated of printing with 40,000 wooden letters, necessary to the printing of a quaternion, a whole folio book--is dreadfully silly. The demonstrating fac-simile demonstrates already the contrary. Wetter’s letters not only declined to have themselves regularly printed, but they also retained their pear-tree-wood-like impatience afterwards. He says, ‘I have deposited the wooden types with their forms in the town-library, where they may be seen at any time.’ Nothing is more liberal.” “I not only deny” [with M. Bernard] adds the Dr., “that they [books printed with moveable wooden characters] exist at present--I deny that they ever have existed.” Nothing can be more emphatic. But, in the first place, “40,000 wooden letters” are not “necessary to the printing of a quaternion, a whole folio book,”--and if they were, the supposition is not “dreadfully silly,” for it was quite within the power of letter-snyders to cut that number if required. But they were not required. I have already shewn (p. 299), that to print two pages of the _Speculum_ the number of letters necessary was under 3,000. It has also been shewn, that the early printers never printed more than one or two pages of their books at a time; while the impressions taken of such productions as the _Speculum_ would in their different editions vary from but 20 to 60 copies each;--3,000 letters therefore were ample for bringing out a whole folio book or quaternion, and the pressure the types were subjected to in the course of a dozen or twenty editions would not more than equal the strain brought to bear upon a single edition of a thousand copies in modern times. It is however “dreadfully silly” to insist, that wooden types, if capable of being used at all in an experiment which proves their capability of printing a portion of a book, ought also to be proved capable of being used for printing a whole book with. In other words, that a whole book should be printed with such types, in order to prove, that as a whole book has been, therefore, a whole book may have been, printed with them. It requires, moreover, no great profundity of wisdom to profess a disbelief in the making and use of wooden types by the inventors of Typography, and to deny the assertions of older and contemporary writers, that they were so made and used. A whole book could just as easily be printed with wooden types, when they were once prepared and ready for use, as half a book, or half a page, or a single word. The real