Oxford’s claim to having introduced printing into England was first disputed by the Cambridge University librarian, Dr Conyers Middleton, in his _Dissertation on the Origin of Printing_, published in 1735. He originated the theory that a numeral x had fallen out of the date or been accidentally omitted, and, after citing several early examples of such a mistake, continued: “But whilst I am now writing, an unexpected Instance is fallen into my hands, to the support of my Opinion; an Inauguration Speech of the Woodwardian Professor, Mr Mason, just fresh from our Press, with its Date given ten years earlier than it should have been, by the omission of an x, viz. MDccxxiv., and the very blunder exemplified in the last piece printed at Cambridge, which I suppose to have happen’d in the first from Oxford.” Middleton also brought forward what has remained the strongest argument against the authenticity of the date, the occurrence in the book of ordinary printed signatures, which are found in no other book until several years later. Finally, he pointed out the very great improbability of the interval of eleven years between the book of 1468 and the two books of 1479. The last person to cling to the 1468 date, doubtless from a sense of duty, is Mr Madan of the Bodleian. In his exhaustive work on the early Oxford press, after having fully put forward the arguments for and against, he sums up the situation as follows: “The ground has been slowly and surely giving way beneath the defenders of the Oxford date, in proportion to the advance of our knowledge of early printing, and all that can be said is that it has not yet entirely slipped away. It is still allowable to assert that the destructive arguments, even if we admit their cumulative cogency, do not at the present time amount to proof.” Another earlier writer on this question ought to be mentioned, Samuel Weller Singer, since he wrote a small book entirely confined to the question of the authenticity of the date. It was entitled “_Some account of the book printed at Oxford in 1468. In which is examined its claim to be considered the first book printed in England._” A small number of copies were privately printed; and the author came to the conclusion that, in his own words, “The book stands firm as a monument of the exercise of printing in Oxford, six years older than any book of Caxton’s with date.” Singer is said to have changed his views on the subject later on, and to have called in and destroyed as many copies as possible. His book may be classed as a curiosity for another reason. The original issue was said to consist of fifty copies privately printed, and as many copies as possible were afterwards destroyed by the author, yet it is a book of the commonest occurrence in secondhand catalogues.