All this is very interesting, but there is not the slightest evidence that it had any effect whatever on the development of printing in Europe. Chinese and Japanese typography is not a development from their own block books, but is a recent importation from Europe. The Chinese characters, which are also used by the Japanese, are not letters but ideograms. Instead of having a few characters representing the fundamental sounds, by the combination of which words are expressed, they have a vast number of characters, many thousands of them. These characters represent to the mind an idea as a whole. They may be vocalized as a word or a syllable, but not as a single sound out of a combination of which syllables and words may be built up. It was quite practicable to carve the characters representing a page on a block and print from that, but it was clearly not practicable to make movable types representing all these almost innumerable characters. Typographic printing is possible only through the selection for common use of a small number of the most essential characters and using them as the basis of a working vocabulary. The introduction of typography represents probably a step toward the reduction of this great number of characters to a comparatively small number representing the sounds or syllables most in use. A font of Chinese type is a fearful and wonderful thing, and learning the case for Chinese composition is a task which very few western people would care to undertake. [Illustration: Modern Chinese Type Case] The accompanying illustration shows a Chinese compositor at his case in the Lakeside Press, Chicago. The “frame” contains one complete font of approximately seven thousand characters. It is about sixteen feet long by five feet high, and is made up of a number of smaller “cases” approximately twelve by fifteen inches over all, each holding about two hundred and forty characters. This font is approximately ten-point body according to United States standards. It required an entire month to “lay the cases.” It requires about ten thousand characters to print a Chinese book, but some of them are made by combinations of primary characters, so that the seven thousand in the case will do the work.