Mr. Mayhew, in his elaborate work upon the Trades and Manufactories of Great Britain says,--“The only evidence as to the origin of fusile types appears to shew that Gutenberg, Faust, and Schœffer, had for some time practised a method of taking casts of types in moulds of plaster.... We are told, though we know not what is the proof of the assertion, that it was Schœffer, who after the failure of casting types in plaster moulds, suggested the process which still continues in operation. Schœffer is said, therefore, to have an undoubted claim to be considered as one of the three inventors of printing; for it is asserted (but upon what evidence we have yet to discover) that he first suggested the cutting of punches, whereby not only could the most beautiful form of letter which the taste and skill of the artist could suggest, be truthfully transferred to the matrix, but a degree of sharpness and finish be given to the face which was quite unattainable in type cut in wood; whilst to the shank of the type the mould would serve to give the nicety of angle requisite to enable any number of such separate letters to be locked up into one solid mass. Add to this, that the punch, being once approved of, could be kept ready to stamp a new matrix with precisely the same form, and with the very same nicety as the first, whenever another might be wanted, and we have a full sense of the benefits which the first inventors of the means of casting fusile types from matrices stamped with punches, conferred upon humanity.” The writer in the Encyclopædia Britannica seems to have been unaware of all the known facts of the case, and to have allowed his imagination full play when writing upon what he considered its possibilities. Mr. Mayhew,--misunderstanding the statement of Trithemius about the shapes of the letters being stamped into moulds so as to form matrices, in which similar shapes were then cast in metal, to be afterwards engraved or cut into letters,--is inclined to be sceptical in regard to Schœffer’s claims, although he does not venture to deny them. Neither of these writers, nor any other with whose works I am acquainted, has succeeded in tracing, in a satisfactory manner, the steps by which Schœffer attained to the realization of his idea. It is no doubt difficult to do so in the absence of positive statements by Schœffer or his contemporaries; but the following considerations, fairly and reasonably deducible from well established facts, may help to a better understanding of the subject than has hitherto been arrived at.