This account, which came, indeed, rather late, although the author referred to the most respectable authorities in support of it, met at first with nothing but incredulity and contempt. At this period the right of Mayence to be considered the birthplace of printing could only be seriously counterbalanced by the right Strasbourg had to be so considered. The three names of Gutenberg, of Faust, and of Schœffer were already consecrated by universal gratitude. Everywhere, then, except in Holland, this new testimony was rejected; everywhere the new inventor, whose claim had just been made for a share of the honour, was rejected as an apocryphal or legendary being. But very soon, however, criticism, raising itself above the influences of nationality, took up the question, discussed the account given by Junius, examined that famous “Speculum” which no one had yet pointed out, proved the existence of xylographic impressions, sought for those which could be attributed to Coster, and opposed to the Abbé Tritheim (or Trithemius), who had written on the origin of printing from information furnished by Peter Schœffer himself, the more disinterested testimony of the anonymous chronicler of Cologne in 1465, who had learned from Ulric Zell, one of Gutenberg’s workmen, and the first printer of Cologne in 1465, this important peculiarity:--“Although the typographic art was invented at Mayence,” says he, “nevertheless the first rough sketch of this art was invented in Holland, and it is in imitation of the ‘Donatus’ (the Latin syntax by Cœlius Donatus, a grammarian of the fourth century, a book then in use in the schools of Europe), which long before that time was printed there; it is in imitation of this, and on account of it, that the said art began under the auspices of Gutenberg.” If Gutenberg imitated the “Donatus,” which was printed in Holland before the time he himself printed at Mayence, Gutenberg was not the inventor of printing. It was in 1450 that Gutenberg began to print at Mayence (Fig. 390); but from as early a date as 1436 he had tried to print at Strasbourg; and, before his first attempts, there had been printed in Holland,--at Haarlem, and Dordrecht,--“Specula” and “Donati” on wooden boards; a process known by the name of _xylography_ (engraving on wood), while the attempts at _typography_ (printing with movable type) made by Gutenberg entirely differed from the other; since the letters, engraved at first on steel points (_poinçons_), and afterwards forced into a copper matrix reproduced by means of casting in a metal more fusible than copper the impress of the point on shanks (_tiges_) made of pewter or lead, hardened by an alloy (Fig. 391).