To the Assyrian brickmakers who, thousands of years ago, used blocks wherewith to impress on their unbaked bricks hieroglyphics and symbolical characters, must be attributed the first hesitating step towards that most marvellous and revolutionary of human discoveries--the art of printing. Not, however, till the early part of the fifteenth century did Gutenberg and Coster conceive the brilliant but simple idea of printing from separate types, which could be set in different orders and combinations to represent different ideas. For Englishmen, 1474 deserves to rank with 1815, as in that year a very Waterloo was won on English soil against the forces of ignorance and oppression, though the effects of the victory were not at once evident. Considering the stir made at the time by the appearance of Caxton’s first book at Westminster, it seems strange that an invention of such importance as the printing-press should have been frowned upon by those in power, and so discouraged that for nearly two centuries printing remained an ill-used and unprogressive art, a giant half strangled in his cradle. Yet as soon as prejudice gave it an open field, improved methods followed close on one another’s heels. To-day we have in the place of Caxton’s rude hand-made press great cylinder machines capable of absorbing paper by the mile, and grinding out 20,000 impressions an hour as easily as a child can unwind a reel of cotton. Side by side with the problem how to produce the greatest possible number of copies in a given time from one machine, has arisen another:--how to set up type with a proportionate rapidity. A press without type is as useless as a chaff-cutter without hay or straw. The type once assembled, as many casts or stereotypes can be made from it as there are machines to be worked. But to arrange a large body of type in a short time brings the printer face to face with the need of employing the expensive services of a small army of compositors--unless he can attain his end by some equally efficient and less costly means. For the last century a struggle has been in progress between the machine compositor and the human compositor, mechanical ingenuity against eye and brains. In the last five years the battle has turned most decidedly in favour of the machine. To-day there are in existence two wonderful contrivances which enable a man to set up type six times as fast as he could by hand from a box of type, with an ease that reminds one of the mythical machine for the conversion of live pigs into strings of sausages by an uninterrupted series of movements.