PROTOTYPOGRAPHY. 577 



the Chinese, who, with their skill in minute carving, could so readily 

 have fashioned them. Perhaps the immense number of characters 

 used in the written language, and certain special methods observed 

 in combinations, may have stood in the way ; while in the West the 

 invention was facilitated by the comparative fewness of the letters in 

 the alphabets, and a consequent simplicity in the necessary combina- 

 tions. A famous passage in a work of Cicero's on The Nature of 

 the Gods, contained clearly the idea of words and sentences formed 

 by selection from a mass of loose separate letters. In opposition to 

 the philosophers who thought that the world and all that is therein 

 had come from a fortuitous concourse of atoms, he says it would be 

 just as easy to believe that " if a great quantity of the one-and- 

 twenty letters, composed either of gold or any other material, were 

 thrown upon the ground, they would fall into such order as legibly to 

 form the 'Annals of Ennius.'" "I doubt," Cicero adds, "whether 

 fortune could make a single verse of them." It is evident, had 

 Cicero's mind happened for some reason to have been turned to the 

 subject, one step further would have taken him to the thought of 

 movable types to be employed in the reproduction of books. But 

 with him the necessity of such an invention was not urgent. HLs 

 numerous clever slaves, trained and highly accomplished as tran- 

 scribers, were always at hand to supply him quickly with the volumes 

 which he coveted so much and loved so well, whenever access for a 

 short time could be obtained to a copy by loan from private or public 

 collections. 



Some years ago verbose disputes were rife as to the inventor of 

 movable types. The distinctive pre-eminence of one out of two or 

 more continental cities was involved in the issue of the strife. 

 Haarlem, at the northern extremity of the Sea of Haarlem, a great 

 sheet of shallow water so called, not far from the mouth of the 

 Rhine, and Mayence, situated on the Rhine itself but far in the 

 interior, each claimed the honour of having sheltei-ed within its walls 

 the man who struck out the happy thought. The question is now 

 held to be settled by a kind of compromise. Great honour to him who 

 conceived the idea of movable types and first employed them, how- 

 ever rudely ; but as great, if not greater, to him who carried forward 

 the idea, experimenting in metals and moulds, until the complex 

 matrix and perfect type as we now see them were achieved. The 

 invention, it is now generally believed, obscurely germinated at 



