Fifteen towns have laid claim to the honour of being the birthplace of printing, and writers who have applied themselves to search out the origin of this admirable invention, far from coming to any agreement on the point in their endeavours to clear up the question, have only confused it. Now, however, after many centuries of learned and earnest controversy, there only remain three antagonistic propositions, with three names of towns, four names of inventors, and three different dates. The three places are Haarlem, Strasbourg, and Mayence; the four inventors, Laurent Coster, Gutenberg, Faust, and Schoeffer; the three dates which are assigned to the invention of printing are 1420, 1440, 1450. In our opinion these three propositions, which some try to combat and destroy by opposing each to the other, ought, on the contrary, to be blended into one, and combined chronologically in such a manner as to represent the three principal periods of the discovery of printing. There is no doubt that printing existed in the germ in ancient times; that it was known and made use of by the ancients. There were stamps and seals bearing legends traced the wrong way, from which positive impressions were obtained on papyrus or parchment, in wax, ink, or colour. We are shown, in museums, plates of copper or of cedar-wood, covered with characters carved or cut out in them, which seem to have been intended for the purpose of printing, and which resemble the block plates of the fifteenth century. [Illustration: Fig. 387.--Ancient Wood-block Print, cut in Flanders before 1440, representing Jesus Christ after his Flagellation. (Delbecq’s Collection, Ghent.)] Something very much like the process of printing in movable type is described by Cicero in a passage in which he refutes the doctrine of Epicurus on the creation of the world by atoms: “Why not believe, also, that by throwing together, indiscriminately, innumerable forms of letters of the alphabet, either in gold or in any other substance, one can _print_ with these letters, on the ground, the _Annals_ of Ennius?” The movable letters possessed by the ancients were carved in box-wood or ivory; but they were only employed for teaching children to read, as Quinctilian testifies in his “Oratorical Institutions,” and St. Jerome in his “Epistles.” There was then only wanting a fortunate chance to cause this carved alphabet to create the typographic art fifteen centuries earlier than its actual birth. [Illustration: Fig. 388.--Fac-simile of an Engraving on Wood, by an ancient Flemish Engraver (about 1438); which was inserted, after the manner of a Miniature, in a Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, containing Prayers for the use of the People. (Delbecq’s Collection, Ghent.)]