of the earliest printed books are without date, but
none could have been printed before 1450; and there is no proof, we
believe, that the Bible said to be of 1455 bore that or any date.
In that year the firm of Gutenberg, Fuest and Schoeffer dissolved. L.
Gregoire in his _Dictionnaire Encyclopedique_, published in Paris in
1817, says that there are only three or four copies of the Fuest
Bible known to exist. Dr. Storrs, however, says, without giving his
authority, that there are fifteen.

The sole idea of the early printers was to imitate exactly the
manuscript characters of the scribes. The initial letters of the
Bibles and the numbers of the chapters were therefore added with a pen
in blue and red ink alternately; and there is not the slightest doubt
that these first books were palmed off upon an unsuspecting public as
manuscripts. All the servants or employes of Fuest and Schoeffer were
put under solemn oath to divulge nothing of the secret concerning
printing. It is to the policy which the first printers exerted to
conceal their art that we owe the tradition of the Devil and Dr.
Faustus. Fuest having printed off quite a number of Bibles, and had the
large initial letters added by hand, he took them to Paris and sold
them for about fifty dollars apiece. The scribes demanded about ten
times that sum, and they earned the money, for it must have been an
herculean task to copy, as they did, every letter of the Bible with
such exquisite care, and then draw and illuminate the heads of the
chapters and the initial letters. It was a marvel how this new man
could produce these ponderous books at so low a rate. And then the
uniformity of the letters and the pages increased the wonder, until
the cry of "sorcerer" was raised: complaints before the magistrates
were made against him, his lodgings were searched and a great number
of copies were found and confiscated. The populace in their ignorance
and superstition declared that he was in league with the devil, and
that the red ink with which the books were embellished was his blood.
It is a satisfaction to know that the Parliament of Paris passed an
act to discharge the sorcerer from all prosecution in consideration of
_the usefulness of his art_.

M.H.

FLOWERS VS. FLIES.

An Irish clergyman is said to have discovered last autumn a charming
antidote to flies, which it is only a pity he could not have lighted
on rather earlier in the season. Having occasion to change