Page:De Vinne, Invention of Printing (1876).djvu/403

Rh where xylography had failed, and developed it by new ideas and new methods. Typography was an invention pure and simple. In the theory and practice of block-printing, there was nothing that could have been improved until it reached the discovery of the only proper method of making types.

It may have been from his experience in the melting and pouring of lead, in the engraving of designs for the frames of his mirrors, in the use of a press for the moulding of the designs for these frames, that Gutenberg derived his first practical ideas of the true method of making types. Whatever the external impulse which led Gutenberg to printing, it was so strong that it compelled him to abandon the practice of all other arts. After this trial we hear no more of him as a maker of mirrors, or a polisher of gems.

The record of the trial before Cune Nope is not the only evidence we have that Gutenberg's unknown art was that of typography. Wimpheling, one of the most learned men of his age, and nearly contemporary with Gutenberg, gives the following testimony concerning early printing in Strasburg:

In another book, in which Wimpheling pays compliment to the intelligence of the people of Strasburg, he writes:

The Chronicle of Cologne is as explicit as to date, but not as to place. It specifies 1440 as the date of the discovery of printing "in the manner that is now generally used."