These notices of card-making are not enough to prove that the process employed was that of xylography. They prove only that card-making was an industry of note in the towns of Ulm, Augsburg and Nuremberg. But when these notices of early card-making are considered in connection with early German prints, like the St. Christopher of 1423, which were discovered in the vicinity of these towns, there is no room for doubt. If prints of saints were made by engraving on wood, cards should have been made by the same art. The connection of cards and image prints in the decree of the Senate of Venice is evidence that they were made by the same persons and by the same process. It may seem strange that the little town of Ulm, in the heart of Germany, should establish by a long sea route a trade [p092] in playing cards with cities on the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. It is but one of many evidences of the growing spirit of commercial enterprise which pervaded all the cities of Germany. It is not more strange than the fact that, in 1505, merchants of Augsburg, a city at a great distance from navigable waters, joined with the Portuguese in an extensive traffic with the eastern coast of Africa. Playing cards may have been made at as early dates in other countries besides Germany and Italy. We shall soon see that they were in common use in many parts of Europe at the beginning of the fifteenth century, but we have no certain knowledge that they were made from engraved blocks in other places. Our knowledge of the fact that they were printed in Italy and Germany is based entirely on occasional notices in old manuscript records. We have indications that they were printed, but we lack the proof. There are no cards in existence which can be offered, with any degree of confidence, as specimens of the block-printing of 1440. The xylographic cards of which fac-similes are most common in books which treat of pastimes, are of the sixteenth century; the copper-plate cards described and illustrated by Weigel and Breitkopf were made either during the latter half of the fifteenth or in the sixteenth century.