"_Omnia quaecunque a primaeua natura constructa sunt, Numerorum videntur racione formata. Hoc enim fuit principale in animo conditoris exemplar_. Imprinted at London by _Gabriel Simson_, dwelling in Fleete Lane, 1600." The volume (which is a small quarto of 270 folios) is dedicated "To the Right Honorable sir Thomas Sackuill, Knight, Baron of Buckhurst, Lord Treasurer of England," &c. &c., by Thomas Hylles. Perhaps one or other of your correspondents will kindly inform me whether this volume is a rarity, and also oblige me with some information regarding Thomas Hylles, its author. SN. DAVIE, Jun. [Professor De Morgan, in his "_Arithmetical Books from the Invention of printing to the present Time_," describes Hylles' work "as a big book, heavy with mercantile lore;" and the author as being, "in spite of all his trifling, a man of learning." A list of the author's other works will be found in Watt's _Bibliotheca Britannica_, and Lowndes's _Bibliographer's Manual of English Literature_, under the word _Hills_ (Thomas). See also Ames's _Typographical Antiquities_.] * * * * * Replies. VILLENAGE. (Vol. iii., p. 327.) Your correspondent H. C. wishes to know whether bondage was a reality in the time of Philip and Mary; and, if so, when it became extinct. It was a reality much later than that, as several cases in the books will show. Dyer, who was appointed chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas in 1559, settled several in which man claimed property in his fellow-man, hearing arguments and giving judgment on the point whether one should be a "villein regardant" or a "villein in gross." Lord Campbell, in his _Lives of the Chief Justices_, gives the following, tried before Dyer, _C.J._: "A. B., seised in fee of a manor to which a villein was regardant, made a feoffment of one acre of the manor by these words: 'I have given one acre, &c., and further I have given and granted, &c., John S., my villein.' Question, 'Does the villein pass to the grantee as a villein in gross, or as a villein appendant to that acre?' The Court being equally divided in opinion, no judgment seems to have been given."--_Dyer_, 48 b. pl. 2.