The maker of this book was the unconscious inventor of the art of printing. Wood-engraving was in use for ages before it occurred to the mind of man that a letter might be as easily reproduced in that way as a picture or figure. To convey scriptural history to the minds of the common people, the wood-engravers (whose art was invented to multiply and cheapen the production of PLAYING-CARDS) made little pictures representing scenes described, and events narrated, in the Bible. For the benefit of the few who could read, it was customary to write on the margin, or at the foot, of the page on which the woodcut was printed, a few words descriptive of the subject or object delineated. This was always done with a pen, by a regular scribe, until, one day, it occurred to the wood-engraver employed on the _Biblia Pauperum_, that these words might be as easily engraved as the figures to which they referred, and of which they were the explanation. He put that idea in practice: and in an instant the sublime ART OF PRINTING was an “accomplished fact.” The advocates of the claims of Koster, Gansefleisch, (or Gutenberg,) Faust (or Fust,) and Schoeffer, to this invention, have wasted much labor in bringing forth conflicting testimony about them. The long-forgotten and now wholly unknown wood-engraver of the _Biblia Pauperum_ had preceded them by half of a generation. Such books were in existence before A.D. 1420; and the earliest date which the Haarlaem Dutchmen set up for the first printing of their fellow-townsman, Lawrence Koster, is 1428. And his pretensions are after all very dubious. Indeed they have been generally condemned as utterly fabulous by bibliographical critics and typographical historians. We introduce it here to show the _color_ and the (thereby indicated) composition of the INK employed. It was _writing-ink_. It contained sulphate of iron (copperas), in combination with vegetable astringent matter, and with very little carbon. The vegetable substance, imperfectly united to the mineral ingredient, has (in obedience to the laws of organic matter) been decomposed and “resolved into its original elements.” It has disappeared; but the IRON remains with its yellow stain, an imperishable memorial of that humble, nameless workman, more enduring than that which the plaintive man of Uz desired; for if those words had been “graven with an IRON PEN and lead in the rock _forever_,” that anticipated eternity might have faded of realization by the action of the rain, the frost, the dust, and innumerable imaginable atmospheric vicissitudes, or, (what is worse,) “the wrath of man.”—Some Cambyses might have demolished the rock itself, and left no more of the inscription than can now be read of those once carved on the cliffs of Edom, the God-created walls of Petra in the valley of EL GHOR.