national or
family importance, and were in early ages, as we know by tradition, very
numerous. Stamped or printed blocks of lead, bearing the names of Roman
authorities, are to be found in the British Museum.

Printing on leather was practised by the Egyptians, as we discover from
their mummies, which have bandages of leather round their heads, with the
name of the deceased printed on them. And in Pompeii a loaf was found on
which the name of the baker and its quality were printed. Among ancient
testimonies, one of the most interesting is that afforded by Cicero in
his _de Natura Deorum_. He orders types to be made of metal, and calls
them _forma literarum_--the very words used by our first printers; and in
another place he gives a hint of separate cut letters when he speaks of
the impossibility of the most ingenious man throwing the twenty-four
letters of the alphabet together by chance, and thus producing the famous
_Annals_ of Ennius. He makes that observation in opposition to the
atheistical argument of the creation of the world by chance.

We have besides, in what is generally classed as a manuscript, a
reasonable although disputed evidence of an elementary stage of printing;
I mean the _Codex Argenteus_ (or _Silver Book_) of Upsala, which contains
a portion of the gospels in Mesogothic, supposed to be of the fourth or
fifth century, the work of Ulfilas. In this codex the first lines of each
gospel and of the Lord's Prayer are in large gold letters, apparently
printed by a stamp, in the manner of a bookbinder, as there are
indentations on the back of the vellum. The small letters are written in
silver. The whole is on a light purple or violet colored vellum.

Having said enough, I think, of the ancients' knowledge of type-forms and
printing materials, I pass on to the recognized establishments of the art
in the fifteenth century; for, whatever knowledge the ancients had
of printing, it would appear to have yielded no immediate fruits to
posterity.

But before I proceed to modern times, I am bound to note that the
Chinese, who seem to have been many centuries in advance of Europe in
most of the industral arts, are supposed to have practised
block-printing, just as they do now, more than a thousand years ago. Nor
does the complicated nature of their written language, which consists of
more than one hundred thousand word-signs, admit of any readier mode. But
they print, or rather rub off, impressions with such spee