nae
Salvationis_, and many others, chiefly devoted to the promulgation of
scripture history. The earliest ones are printed, or rather transferred
by friction--and therefore on one side only of the paper--entirely from
solid blocks; later on, some portions were printed with movable types of
wood; and at last the letter-press was entirely of movable metal types.
Junius says that Koster by degrees exchanged his wooden types for leaden
ones, and these for pewter; and I will add that it is not unlikely they
may have been cast in lead or pewter plates from the wooden blocks, as
metal-casting was well understood at the time.

The pretensions of Haarlem and Koster have for more than a century been a
matter of fierce controversy; and there have been upward of one hundred
and fifty volumes written for or against, without any approach to a
satisfactory decision. This one thing is certain, that, whether or not we
owe the first idea of movable type to Laurence Koster or to Haarlem, we
do not owe to the period any very marked use of it; that was reserved for
a later day.

There is a story current, dependent on the authority of Junius, that
Koster's principal workman, assumed to be Hans or John Faust--and some,
to reconcile improbabilities, even say John Gutenberg--who had been sworn
to secrecy, decamped one Christmas Eve, after the death of Koster, while
the family were at church, taking with him types and printing apparatus
and, after short sojourns at Amsterdam and Cologne, got to Mainz or
Mayence with them, and there introduced printing. He is said by Junius
to have printed, about the year 1442--that is, two years after Koster's
death--the _Doctrinale_ of Alexander Gallus and the _Tracts_ of Peter of
Spain, with the very types which Koster made use of in Haarlem; but as no
volume of this kind has ever been discovered, nor any trace of one, the
entire story is generally regarded as apocryphal. Laurence Koster died
in 1440, at the age of seventy; therefore any printing attributed to him
must be within that period.

What has hitherto been advanced proves only that mankind had walked for
many centuries on the borders of the two great inventions, chalcography
and typography, without having fully and practically discovered either of
them.

We now come to the great epoch of printing--I mean the complete
introduction, if not actually the first invention, of movable metal
or fusile types. This took place at Mainz, in or before 1450, an