these letters; which induced him to pursue the accidental discovery." Not only are these accounts evidently deficient in authenticity, but it should be remarked that the earliest of them was not put before the world until Laurence Coster had been nearly a hundred and fifty years in his grave. The presumed writer of the narrative which first did justice to his memory had been also twelve years dead when his book was published. His information, or rather the information brought forward under cover of his name, was derived from an old man who, when a boy, had heard it from another old man who lived with Coster at the time of the robbery, and who had heard the account of the invention from his master. For, to explain the fact of the early appearance of typography in Germany, the Dutch writers are forced to the hypothesis that an apprentice of Coster's stole all his master's types and utensils, fleeing with them first to Amsterdam, second to Cologne, and lastly to Mentz! The whole story is too improbable to be accepted by any impartial inquirer; and the best authorities are agreed in dismissing the Dutch fiction with the contempt it deserves, and in ascribing to JOHN GUTENBERG, of Mentz, the honour to which he is justly entitled. * * * * * Of the career of Gutenberg we shall speak presently, but let us first point out that the invention of typography, like all great inventions, was no sudden conception of genius--not the birth of some singularly felicitous moment of inspiration--but the result of what may be called a gradual series of causes. Printing with movable types was the natural outcome of printing with blocks. We must go back, therefore, a few years, to examine into the origin of "block books." Mr. Jackson observes that there cannot be a doubt that the principle on which wood engraving is founded--that of taking impressions on paper or parchment, with ink, from prominent lines--was known and practised in attesting documents in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Towards the end of the fourteenth, or about the beginning of the fifteenth century, he says, there seems reason to believe that this principle was adopted by the German card-makers for the purpose of marking the outlines of the figures on their cards, which they afterwards coloured by the practice called _stencilling_.