“The art of taking impressions once discovered,” says M. Léon de Laborde, “and applied to engraving in relief, gave rise to printing, which was only the perfection to which a natural and rapid progression of attempts and efforts would naturally lead.” “But it was only,” adds M. Ambroise-Firmin Didot, “when the art of making paper--that art familiar to the Chinese from the beginning of our era--spread in Europe and became generally known, that the reproduction, by pressing, of texts, figures, playing-cards, &c., first by the tabular process, called _xylography_ (block-printing), then with movable types, became easy, and was consequently to appear simultaneously in different places.” [Illustration: Fig. 389.--Wood-block, cut in France, about 1440, representing an Image of St. James the Great, with one of the Commandments as a Text. (Imperial Library, Paris, Collection of Prints.)] But, at the end of the fourteenth century, at Haarlem, in Holland, wood-engraving had been discovered, and consequently _tabular impression_, with which the Chinese, it is said, were already acquainted three or four hundred years before the modern era. Perhaps it was some Chinese book or pack of cards brought to Haarlem by a merchant or a navigator, that revealed to the cardmakers and printsellers of the industrious Netherlands a process of impressing more expeditious and more economical. Xylography began on the day when a legend was engraved on a wood-block; this legend, limited at first to a few lines, very soon occupied a whole page; then this page was not long in becoming a volume (Fig. 387 to 389).