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Rh dissimilarities are the evidences of accident and repair; that when the block was injured, it was plugged, as is frequently done with wood-cuts in our own day, and the newly inserted plug was re-engraved with a new design. The explanation is not plausible. The differences generally appear in the same relative position on every page, and there are too many of them to be attributed to accident; they seem to have been made for some unknown purpose. Irregularities of like nature have been noticed in copies of the typographic books of the fifteenth century which are known to be of the same edition.

We do not certainly know when and where these blocks were engraved, but we do know when they were destroyed. Two books, published by Peter Van Os of Zwoll, in Holland, in 1488 and 1489, contain seventy-seven engravings on wood which were certainly cut from the blocks that had been used to print the original edition of the Bible of the Poor. To get the little cuts he needed to illustrate texts of movable type, Van Os must have partly destroyed the original blocks. In this act of destruction, we have a fact and a date which give a clue to the origin of the book. Copies of the first edition in folio form must have been printed before 1488. At this date, and perhaps for some time before, the blocks in folio form had no mercantile value; there was no longer any demand for the book in the neighborhood in which it had been made. That the country in which this first edition was printed and sold was Holland, seems probable when we find that the blocks were used for the last time, and in a mutilated form, in a town of Holland. This opinion is strengthened by the facts that the Bible of the Poor in folio form was then, and afterward, a salable book in Germany and in other countries, but it was not subsequently reprinted in the Netherlands in any form. The Dutch and Flemish architectural features in the designs, and the legends which attribute the work to Dutch engravers and printers, are of themselves unsatisfactory evidences of the origin of the book; but they cannot be entirely overlooked They lead to the conclusion that the book was printed in