question at issue is not, Can a single book, or has a single book, ever been printed with wooden types?--a question answered with an emphatic, although an unproved No! by Dr. Van Der Linde and other anti-xylo-typographers;--but, Did the earliest Typographers, in their first experiments, make use of wooden types or not? Trithemius says, on information derived from Schœffer senior, that they did. His statement is borne out by that of Zell, who says Gutenberg got the _beginning_ of this art from the Donatuses, _i. e._ block-books, printed in Holland. Bergellanus, an independent inquirer a generation later, and for fifteen years a corrector of the press at Mentz, confirms the statement of Trithemius; while Faust of Aschaffenburg declares that the family papers in his possession bore evidence to the same effect. What the first German printers did, it was most natural that the first Dutch printer would also do; and, as I have already pointed out (p. 346,) there are reasons for believing that wherever the _Speculum_[148] was printed, (and later information seems to indicate that Utrecht may have been the place), the types used were the work of a letter-snyder, and the material of which they were made was wood. It is quite a different question, Could a continued series of works, be produced by the use of wooden types, in a manner equal, or nearly equal, to that by which works are produced with metal types? To such a question, the advocates of the use, first, of wooden types by the earliest Typographers, reply, No; wooden types would only answer for a while; and because of their fragile nature, metal types, cut or cast, became sooner or later a necessity.[149] It is, besides, if not “dreadfully silly,” at least unwise, to argue against the possibility of the original use of wooden types, because the specimens given by Schinkel and Wetter are crooked and irregular, and do not _line_, although tied or strung together with string. Schinkel and Wetter both maintained that the _Speculum_ was printed with metal types; so did Enschedé. For either of the three, therefore, to have thoroughly succeeded with his experiment, would have been fatal to his argument and preconceived opinion. Doubtless, it was scarcely possible for Enschedé to succeed in making wooden letters of “a size somewhat larger than a pin’s head.” His mode of stating that part of his experiment is not at all so straightforward or clear as it might and should have been. But he says further, “I made a slip of Text Corpus, and figured the letters on the wood or slip,” &c. Now, what is the size of the Text Corpus? I am rather at a loss to understand this expression, as I find that the Dutch type called _Text_, is that which corresponds to the English Great Primer, which contains 51½ lines to a foot, while the _Garmond_, corresponding to the German _Corpus_, is equal to the English Long Primer, which has 89 lines to a foot. Neither does Enschedé say what particular wood he used in his experiment.