The first edition is in the form of a small quarto. On the title-page below the title is a printer’s mark or emblem, which is not of Holbein’s designing or Lützelburger’s cutting, representing three heads—of an old man, a youth, and a woman—joined together, two in profile, and the central one, that of the woman, full face, with a star on her forehead, and a wreath above. From the shoulders spring a pair of peacock’s wings, the whole resting on a pedestal, on the top of which is an open book inscribed in Greek characters, “Gnothi Seauton,” and at the foot a serpent and two chained globes, one surmounted by a small cross, and the other with two wings. This emblem has the further motto “Usus me Genuit.” At the bottom of the page is printed, “A Lyon, Soubz lescu de Coloigne, M.D.XXXVIII.” At the end of the book, within an ornamental border, is the imprint: “Excvdebant Lvgdvni Melchior et Gaspar Trechsel Fratres. 1538.” Next to the title-page comes a preface of six pages, which is followed by seven pages descriptive of “diverses tables de Mort, non painctes, mais extraictes de l’escripture saincte, colorées par Docteurs Ecclesiastiques, et umbragées par Philosophes.” After these verbal sketches come the woodcuts themselves, forty-one in all, each one printed on a separate page, and, in place of the German titles of the various sets of early proofs, a text in Latin above the pictures, and beneath them a four-lined verse in French, written by Gilles Corrozet, containing moral reflections appropriate to the various subjects. The subjects themselves are not arranged in the same order as in the proof impressions, in which the clergy are separated from the laity, and the men from the women, beginning with the Pope and ending with the Little Child. In the Lyon edition the Emperor follows the Pope, and is in turn followed by the King, the Cardinal, the Empress, and so on. The pictures are succeeded by a series of descriptions of Death and reflections on mortality of a didactic character, under the title, “Figures de la Mort moralement descriptes, & depeinctes selon l’authorité de l’scripture & des sainctz Peres,” the whole being brought to a conclusion with a discourse, “De la Necessite de la Mort qui ne laisse riens estre pardurable.”