The fact that a letter was pulled out of the form seems to show that the type composing the line could not have been threaded together, as set forth by Ottley in his theory of clay molds for casting type. It is to be remembered, however, that in the early days of printing, every printer was his own type-founder. The method of casting type had not been standardized and each printer had his own individual ideas both as to the kind of characters and the method used in casting them. Some may have threaded their type together in lines and others may have simply locked them up in the form face downward in the composing stone to overcome any irregularities caused by crude methods of casting. Vinc. Fineschi, of Florence, in Italy, gives an extract from the cost-book of the Ripoli press, about 1480, which shows that steel, brass, copper, tin, lead and iron were all used in the manufacture of type at that period. Today we have the wizardry of mechanical production in the manufacture of type. The linotype and monotype machines, uncanny in their operations, have also come into common practice. Without them printing would seem almost as primitive, in typography, as it was in its infancy. STEREOTYPING About the beginning of the eighteenth century a certain Van der Meyer, of Antwerp, made the next step towards a definite improvement in typography, the first that had been attempted since the invention of printing from movable, cast-metal type. Van der Meyer prepared the composed pages of the Bible by soldering together the bottom of the type in the form. This was the first "stereotype," a term derived from two Greek words meaning literally "solidtype." This method met one requirement. It prevented the "pi-ing" of the type, but it had the disadvantage of holding in comparative idleness a large and costly mass of type useless for any other purpose, and it was not generally practiced. This was followed in 1730, by William Ged, a goldsmith of Edinburgh, who is credited with casting printing-plates in plaster-of-paris molds for the University of Cambridge Bible. These plates, however, were destroyed by jealous printers and thrown aside, resulting in the process being abandoned for many years.