But at any rate he avows, that, using the best and finest tools he could procure, he failed. On the opposite side of the question, I have but to place my own experience; and I may say at the outset, that I have not practised wood engraving for nearly twenty years, that at best I was but an amateur, and that the only tools I had, when I ventured upon the experiment a few months ago, were a common graver, an ordinary tenon saw, a penknife, and a rasp and file. With these implements then, I made, precisely in the way I have described the method I supposed the earliest printers would follow, the letters inserted in page 310. They are of box wood, Pica-size (71½ lines to a foot) and are squared and line well, and are perforated and nicked, and are two sizes smaller than the letters used for the _Speculum_, which are only 54 lines to the foot. The letter =t= I here insert again. More than 1,500 impressions have been taken from it; and it scarcely yet seems anything the worse for wear. Calculating by the time the cutting of the three letters occupied, I could, without difficulty, finish in nine months 3,000 letters equally good, as mathematically square, as true to line, as capable of being used again and again, and therefore as capable of printing a book, a whole folio, with. An expert Chinese ‘chop’ cutter (the modern letter-snyder) would with his simple tools, complete the same number in less than a third of that time: and I know of no reason why similar types of the _Corpus_ or Long Primer size could not be cut on wood. Certainly there is nothing “impossible, ridiculous or chimerical” in the idea. Where then is the “silliness”--the “dreadful silliness”--of supposing that a whole book could be printed with such wooden types, even supposing, further, that 40,000 would be required in all? The “dreadful silliness” lies in the cry of those who argue on the opposite side--“Let a _book_ be produced, printed with moveable wooden letters, instead of all those experiments which signify nothing.” The answer to that cry is, _Cui bono?_--Why should a book be printed, when 3 letters are as good as 3,000, or 30,000, or 300,000, to demonstrate the fact, that words are and can be, and that therefore pages and whole books may be, (and therefore also that they may have been,) printed from such separable wooden types? As well might the demand be made that a whole suburb of London should be lighted up with obsolete oil-lamps, in order to demonstrate to the rising generation the fact, that in that manner the streets of the city were lighted up in the days of their forefathers, before the introduction of coal gas. In the one case, as in the other, a single specimen, one demonstrative example, ought to be sufficient to carry, to every candid and reasonable mind, a conviction of the truth of the asserted fact. But perhaps it “signifies nothing” to a certain class, who are determined not to believe, how great or how small the demonstrative experiments may be.