enable us to work it in such a manner. In the tombs of the Via Latina which were lately discovered, it is worked as freely as if it were clay, and was plainly so prepared as to enable the artist to take his own time in modeling, without fear of its hardening—or, as we call it, setting—immediately. This, then, is nothing new. It is not casting, and these figures are not casts. They are stamps, just like the ectypa of terra cotta. We know that κοροκόσμια or dolls were anciently made in this way of wax and gypsum, or of terra cotta; and these are κοροκόσμια. To infer from the fact that the Greeks knew and practiced the art of pressing into shallow moulds of stone, without under-cuttings, either clay, pitch, wax, or plaster, that they also understood and practiced the art of making moulds and casts from life or from the round is utterly unwarrantable. Nothing is more simple than the one art, while the other is extremely complex. The one is merely like making an impression from a seal, which would naturally suggest itself to the first person who left the pressure of his foot in clay or mud; the other requires various processes of calculation and invention. In inventions it is not always or ordinarily the first step which costs, but the subsequent and calculated steps. Centuries often elapse between the first step and the second. A remarkable instance of this is to be found in the history of the invention of printing. The first steps to this wonderful art were taken by the ancient Romans; the very process by which we now print was known and practiced by them; but the application of it to the printing of books does not seem to have occurred to their minds. It cannot, however, but appear most extraordinary that the idea of printing should not have occurred to them when we consider the facts of the case. Pliny relates that Cato published a book containing portraits of distinguished persons of his time, of which there were many copies; and so far as we can conjecture, these copies were probably stamped on parchment or some such material, and afterwards colored. Putting this together with the fact that ancient bricks have been lately found in Rome with names and numbers stamped upon them by means of movable types, so that the numbers or letters could be arranged at will, we might absolutely state that the ancient Romans understood and practiced the art of printing. They certainly did print on their brick; they probably stamped the portraits of cuts in their books,—but so far as we know they never united the processes, and never stamped a book with movable types. Adopting Mr. Perkins’s method of argument, we might declare, however, that the mere fact that none of these printed books have ever come down to us was entirely inconclusive, since these books might have utterly perished; while we have the clearest proof that they did print with movable types on brick, and therefore it is plain that they invented printing.