Here then are three writers, living at the same time with Junius, all making inquiries upon the same subject, and deriving their information from a common source, who differ from him on almost every point, and in some of the most material plainly contradict him. With reference to the 5th point, the invention of metal types,--whether cut or cast Junius does not say,--Henry Spiegel, senator of Amsterdam (_b._ 1549, _d._ 1612), states in his Dutch poem _Hertspiegel_. “Thou first, Laurentius, to supply the defect of wooden tablets, adoptedst wooden types, and afterwards didst connect them with a thread, to imitate writing. A treacherous servant surreptitiously obtained the honor of the discovery: but truth itself, though destitute of common and wide spread fame, truth I say, still remains.” This Spiegel was a personal friend of Coornhert, and it may be presumed consulted him respecting Junius’s account of the origin of printing at Haarlem. Of metal types he makes no mention; but if the traditions of Haarlem at that time gave Laurentius the credit of their invention, it is altogether unaccountable why Spiegel omitted so noteworthy a circumstance. He probably rejected, on Coornhert’s authority, what Junius had written on that part of the subject. Junius’s story of the theft of Coster’s types and implements is confused and contradictory. For supposing for a moment that Coster was the printer of the _Mirror of Salvation_, and that the types were made of pewter; if all that had been cast for printing, (at the most not more than two pages at a time), had been carried away, together with the punches, matrices, &c., how came the wine-pots, alleged to be still in existence when Junius wrote, to be made of them when they became waste metal? These wine-pots afford grounds for the assertion, by later writers, that the art continued to be practised by the Coster family _after_ the alleged theft; but that assertion is contradicted by the statements elsewhere made. Of the theft itself there is no proof. The records of the city have been searched in vain for evidence of any such robbery. And the search has been equally fruitless for evidence of any such invention. As to the latter, the wine-pots are the chief witnesses. They were said to be kept in the house inhabited by Laurent Coster’s great-grandson Gerard Thomas; they could be appealed to; but what then? their evidence is not even as valuable as that adduced by the school boy who claimed to be the carver of a certain piece of wood-work, “and here,” said he, “is the very knife with which I did it.” In the boy’s case it could at least be shewn, that the knife was one with which the carving might have been executed; but it would be utterly impossible to prove, without other and more reliable evidence than the appearance of the pots themselves, that they had been the original prototypes of the art of Typography. Meerman, however, insists upon it that the Costers carried on the printing business at Haarlem