Those who have written in defense of types of wood have failed to see that the cutting of the faces is the least difficult part of the work. The real difficulty is in the cutting of the bodies—in making bodies so accurate that they can be interchanged with facility, in all kinds of combinations, without showing distortion in the line of the face. In small types made of wood this accuracy is not possible. Even if it were possible to cut them, it would be impossible to use them. No care could keep them from warping. Types must be wet with ink, and they must be cleansed with lye or water; they must be exposed to changes from heat to cold, from dampness to dryness. Under these influences, the little skewers of wood, for so they must be regarded, would soon be twisted out of shape, and unfitted for future service. It is in this liability to warp that types of wood fail most signally. It is not enough that they can be made to serve for one experiment; the only demonstration of practicability that a printer can accept is [p297] that of repeated distribution and recomposition, a feat which has never been done. That types of wood were tried by the inventor of typography is probable; that single leaves were printed, experimentally, is possible; but the statement that any printer used them repeatedly in the printing of books, cannot be admitted. No book was ever printed in Europe with small types of wood. It is time, says Van der Linde, that criticism made a bonfire of these imaginary types.[153] The hypothesis of types of wood has been given up reluctantly. It was considered that the singular variety of letters, so noticeable in all the books of the unknown printer, and so contrary to the usage of the modern type-founder, could have been produced only by engraving the types. A demonstration of the impracticability of bodies of wood seemed to [p298] destroy with it the only reasonable explanation of the greatest peculiarity of these types. To place this imaginary method of making types on unassailable ground, Meerman offered a modification of the theory. He supposed that the first printers of Germany founded little cubes of metal, with truly squared bodies, upon one end of which the faces were subsequently engraved. The misconstruction of the language of a chronicler of the sixteenth century—who, in trying to explain the process of making types, carelessly placed the cutting of the punch after the founding of the type—seemed a full warrant for this conjecture. It is, however, but a conjecture: there is no credible authority for the statement that the printers first cast the bodies and then cut the faces. Cut types, if made at all, were made only in the way of preliminary experiment. The method is as impracticable as it is absurd. “He must have been an imbecile,” says Bernard, “who could not see that the process of founding in a mould which made the body would also make the face.”