The old unmeaning practice of printing every noun substantive with a capital letter (still retained in German) has been abandoned by every English printer, except the printer of parliamentary papers for the House of Lords. Proper names used to be printed in italics; and generally, the use of italics was much greater than at present. In modern reprints, these ancient flowers of typography ought to be removed. The convenient edition of Hobbes' _Works_, for which we are indebted to Sir W. Molesworth, would be more agreeable to read if the italics were less abundant. The use of the folio and quarto size is now generally restricted to such books as could scarcely be printed in octavo, as dictionaries and similar books of reference. The parliamentary blue book, which long resisted the progress of octave civilization, is now beginning to shrink into a more manageable size. With regard to separate volumes, the most convenient practice is to consider them as a mere printer's division, which may vary in different editions; and to number them consecutively, without reference to their contents. The Germans have a very inconvenient practice of dividing a volume into parts, each of which is a volume in the ordinary meaning of the word; so that a work consisting of nine volumes, for example, may be divided into four volumes, one of which consists of three parts, and the other three of two parts each. The result is, that every reference must specify both the volume and the part: thus, Band II. Abtheilung III. S. 108. Frequently, too, this mode of numbering misleads the bookbinder, who (unless properly cautioned) numbers the volumes in the ordinary manner. Volumes, as I have remarked, are merely a printer's division. Every literary composition ought, however, to have an organic division of its own. The early Greeks seem indeed to have composed both their poems and prose works as one continuous discourse. The rhapsodies of Homer and the muses of Herodotus were subsequent divisions introduced by editors and grammarians. But literary experience pointed out the commodiousness of such breaks in a long work; and the books of the _Æneid_ and of the _History of Livy_ were the divisions of the authors themselves. Since the invention of printing, the books of the prose works of the classical writers have been subdivided into chapters; while for the books of poems, as well as for the dramas, the verses have been numbered. The books of the Old and New Testament have likewise been portioned into chapters, and into a late typographical division of verses.