Two of our reproductions are from the copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale. For the others, which are defective in this copy, we are indebted to M. Jacques Rosenthal, who considers that the volume was printed in 1480. In our own opinion the later date is more probable. The four initials, of uniform size and style, A, C, E, and S, the E with the Nativity being certainly one of the prettiest we have seen, have every appearance of being taken from a missal. We cannot affirm for certain that they have no such origin, but the book from which they were reproduced is an edition of Pogge, printed by Knoblouch in 1513. Two of them, the E with the Nativity and another, occur in an _Interpretatio Sequentiarum_ of the same year. Other printers used them, however, before this. We are unable to give exact references for the whole series, but the E had served already in a volume of sermons of Geyler von Kaisersperg, published by Matthias Schurer in 1505. In this, with the exception of a floral V on the second page, it is the only woodcut initial. There is a Psalter of Knoblouch of 1513 of the same size as those of Augsburg, Basle--and Metz--_Psalterium cum apparatu vulgari firmiter appresso_. Like the Metz Psalter, it has an initial on the title, this being ornamented with a moth and dragon-fly and bunches of leaves and flowers. Below is a cut of David with his harp, the Almighty looking down, and a German castle in the background. There are two strips of border, one on each side of the cut, but descending lower, one of a conventional foliated pattern, the other with strawberry leaves, flowers, and fruit. The initial B is of the same design; the other letters have dragon-flies or butterflies, a D has a geometrical pattern something like the Maiblümchen. Grüninger began to decorate his publications with ornamental letters at the end of the last decade of the fifteenth century. They are of a very special kind, and the only other printer who occasionally used them was Quentell of Cologne.[23] Some of them occur in a small folio by Braunschweig--_Liber Pestilentialis de venenis epidemie_, 1500, with pictures on nearly every page, manufactured according to the system he adopts in many of his illustrated books of bringing three factors of the picture together, and so obtaining variety with an economy of engraving. The centre of a picture on one page, for instance, will be found a few pages later with the two outer thirds replaced by different blocks, the variety introduced into the general appearance being sufficient for it to pass as a different composition. A few pages later, it is the centre that is replaced with the same effect. Such pictures are to be seen in the different editions of Braunschweig’s _De Cyrurgia_, in which there are only insignificant nonhistoriated initials.