Page:De Vinne, Invention of Printing (1876).djvu/363

Rh greater doubts than ever about the chronology of the invention. For, in 1740, upon the occasion of the third jubilee of Coster's invention, two silver medals were struck, with legends curiously unlike. We here see that the name of the inventor is printed in different forms; one medal bears the date 1440, and the other contains the date 1428. These irregularities prepare us for what is to follow.

In 1757, Gerard Meerman, subsequently a distinguished champion of the Haarlem legend, wrote "that the pretentious assertion of the invention of printing by Laurens Coster begins to lose credit more and more. The particulars that have been related by Seiz are mere suppositions, and the chronology of Coster's invention and enterprise is a romantic fiction."

But, in the year 1760, Daniel Schoepflin, an eminent scholar of Strasburg, wrote a valuable contribution to the history of typography, under the title of Vindicicæ Typographicæ. Meerman was provoked to emulation. He had not believed in the legend, but he thought that he could construct a theory of the invention, which would, to some extent, concede the claims of the rival cities of Haarlem, Strasburg and Mentz. In this illogical manner, by the construction of a theory before