HAMir/fON SCIENTIFIC ASSOCIATION 89 



printing establishment in the woi-ld. Peter the Second, 

 whom the inquisition ranked with heretical printers, followed 

 his art at Worms for seventeen years, and scrutiny of the 

 watermarks of the paper, type, and other characteristics by 

 which experts judge as to where, when and by whom a book 

 was printed, point to these conclusions as to the origin of 

 Tyndale's first complete New Testament as being essentially 

 true. 



How many copies of Tyndale's version Schoeffer printed 

 is not certain. Possibly the quarto edition Quentel com- 

 menced at Cologne was completed at Worms or near Worms ; 

 or a new quarto version was simultaneously printed with the 

 smaller format. Copies of both sizes were sold in England in 

 1526, the next year. Herman Busch informed the Elector of 

 Saxony that six thousand copies were printed at Worms, and 

 that the translator, who had two assistants, was a learned 

 man. On these points Busch was sure to be well informed, 

 for he was a professor in Luther's university at Marburg, 

 had written some of the best of the " Epistolae Obscurorum 

 Virorum " — that piece of sixteenth century controversy still 

 noted for its irony and coarse wit — and he was already the 

 missionary of humanism. 



During the next ten years of Tyndale's life he translated 

 the Pentateuch and the book of Jonah, and issued a revised 

 edition of his New Testament. In a part of the Pentateuch 

 translation, Coverdale, his friend, assisted him. The rest of 

 Tyndale's life was full of adventurous escapes from the wiles 

 of his enemies, till at length, early in 1535, he fell a victim to 

 the plot of one Phillips. He was arrested at Antwerp for 

 heresy, and after eighteen months' imprisonment in the castle 

 of Vilvorde, near Brussels, was tried and condemned as a 

 heretic. At Vilvorde sentence was carried into execution, 

 for there, on October the sixth, 1536, William Tyndale was 

 strangled and burnt at the stake. An official paper bearing 

 number 191,622 is filed at Brussels in the Belgian archives, 

 which gives the names of the commissioners who tried him 

 and the sums paid for their services. The same document 



