Indeed, nothing in this great world which concerns the well-being of man takes place by accident, but is brought forward by divine will, precisely at the moment most suitable to our condition. So it was with astronomy, the mariner's compass, the steam-engine, gas, the electric telegraph, and many other of those blessings which have progressed with civilization. The elements were there and known, but the time had not arrived for their fructification. And so it is with printing: although its invention is placed in the middle of the fifteenth century, and almost the very year fixed, this can only be regarded as a matured stage of it. To illustrate this, I propose to begin with a cursory view of its primitive elements, of which the very first were no doubt initiative marks and numerals. The use of numerals has been denominated "the foundation of all the arts of life"; and we know with certainty that several nations, and among them the Mexicans, had numerals before they were acquainted with letters. The first method of reckoning was with the fingers, but small stones were also used--hence the words "calculate" and "calculation," which are derived from _calculus_, the Latin for a pebble-stone. The Chinese counted for many years with notched sticks; and even in England, in comparatively modern times, accounts were kept by tallies, in which notches were cut alike in two parallel pieces of wood. Shakespeare alludes to "the score and the tally" in his _Henry VI_; and this mode of keeping accounts is still adopted by some of the bakers and dyers in Warwickshire and Cheshire. And tallies are occasionally produced in the small-debt courts, where they are admitted as authentic proofs of debt. Hence the origin and name of the "tally court of the exchequer." The Peruvians, at the time they were conquered by Pizarro, counted with knotted strings. After numerals, came picture-writing, hieroglyphics, and symbolic characters, such are were used by the Egyptians, the Chinese, and the Mexicans; which, however unconnected they may be with each other, are of the same general character. Indeed, the Chinese have never advanced beyond symbolic characters, of which it is said they have more than one hundred thousand combinations or varieties. Rude as these conditions of humanity may seem, they are matched in modern England, even at a very recent date, if we may credit a well-known story: A rustic shopkeeper in a remote district, being unable to read or write, contrived to keep his accounts by picture-writing, and charged his customer, the miller, with a cheese instead of a grindstone, from having omitted to mark a hole in the centre.