Now it has never been asserted or pretended that the Chinese, even at a much later period than this, had advanced beyond the use of monogram stamps impinged by hand. In lack, therefore, of more direct evidence, this is enough to justify us in rejecting the claim put forward in behalf of the Chinese, to the invention of the art of wood-engraving or typography, and the idea of its having been imported from them into Europe. But there is no lack of more direct evidence. For in the year of the Christian era 1271, Marco Polo, a Venetian trader, voyaged from Venice to Tartary and China, in the reign of the Emperor Rublai Khan, his uncle and father having visited the same countries some quarter of a century before. On his return, he published an account of his travels, very copious and very full of marvelous truths and marvelous errors--most of the latter having been since shown to be misconceptions of real truths, not falsehoods. In this work, Marco Polo makes no mention of the use of printing-blocks, or of cannon, or of the mariner’s compass by the Chinese. Hence it is morally certain, either that the Chinese did not at that period possess any one of these inventions-- all of which have been attributed to them--at all, or that the people for whom Marco Polo wrote, the Venetians in particular, and Europeans in general, possessed them in the same degree of perfection with the Chinese, at the same or at an earlier period. It is, indeed, probable, that the Chinese claim was only put in by favorers of the Venetian claim to the European invention or introduction of this art, in order to account reasonably for their priority. And it would be curious, were it not almost invariably the case, that the forged legend introduced to support a false claim, when analyzed and searched by a clear head, not only confutes itself, but that which it was intended to establish. It is very satisfactorily proved that previous to the fourteenth century, although stencils and stamps had been in use for some time, perhaps for some centuries, as means for securing the invariability of monogram signatures, and of giving the power of signing papers to those who could not write, no use whatever had been made or attempted of either, for the purpose of reproduction from a single type and indefinite multiplication of copies. This is what we mean by printing and engraving; and until it be shown that some nation of antiquity did invent and use such instruments for such purposes, all discussion is absurd.