All these aids are, comparatively, of recent introduction. The beginnings of the telegraph, the railroad and the express are within the memory of the men of the present generation. The systematic establishment of free schools and libraries is the work of the present century. Public mails and post-offices were introduced in 1530, but it is only within the past forty years that their management has been more liberal for the benefit of the people. It is by aids like these, and not by its intrinsic merits alone, that printing has received its recent development. It was for the want of these aids that printing languished for many years after its invention. One has but to consider the many supports printing has received to see that its premature invention would have been fruitless. If, even now, when books and readers and literary tastes are as common as they were infrequent, it is necessary to the success of printing that there shall be schools and libraries, cheap and rapid methods of travel, generous postal facilities, a liberal government and a broad toleration of the greatest differences in opinion, what but failure could have been expected when the world was destitute of nearly all? Printing not only had to wait many centuries for improvements in mechanical appliances, without which it would have been worthless; it had to wait for a greater number of readers, for liberal governments, for instructive writers, for suitable books. It came at the proper time, not too soon, not too late. “Not the man, the age invents.” [p049] III The Key to the Invention of Typography. Conflicting Theories about the Invention of Typography . . . Was it an Invention or a Combination? . . . Errors of Superficial Observers . . . Merit of the Invention is not in Impression . . . Not altogether in Types or Composition . . . Types of no value unless they are Accurate . . . Hand-made Types Impracticable . . . Merit of Invention is in the Method of Making Types . . . Is but One Method . . . Description . . . Counter-Punch . . . Punch . . . Matrix . . . Mould . . . Illustrations . . . Type-Making as Illustrated by Moxon in 1683 . . . As Illustrated by Amman in 1564 . . . Notices of Type-Making by Earlier Authors . . . Type-Mould the Symbol of Typography . . . Inventor of the Type-Mould the Inventor of Typography . . . A Great Invention, but Original only in the Type-Mould. * * * * * The character of typography is not pressing and printing but mobilization. The winged A is its symbol. The elements unchained, the letters freed from every bond in which the pen or chisel of calligrapher or xylographer held them entangled; the cut character risen from the tomb of the solitary tablet into the substantive life of the cast types—that is the invention of printing. _Van der Linde._ * * * * *