Page:Essays in librarianship and bibliography.djvu/154

 recorded are undoubtedly productions of one and the same press, although the place of imprint is frequently varied. One curiosity remains to be mentioned, a fragment of a Guarani catechism and syllabary, consisting of two wooden leaves paginated 4 and 13, on which characters are cut in relief precisely as in Chinese stereotypic printing. It is to be supposed that they are older than the books printed with movable types. They are in the library of Señor Lamas, to whom they were presented by an English traveller.

Four out of these seven books are in the British Museum—the Vocabulario and Arte of Ruiz de Montoya, Yapuguai's Catechism, and the letter of Antequera y Castro. The first two were presented in 1818 by Mr. George Bellas Greenough, the founder of the Geological Society. The Catechism was purchased in 1889, and the letter in 1893. The latter is the only copy hitherto known, and is the only one of the seven books of which some portion is not facsimiled by Señor Medina.

Printing had died out in Paraguay before its introduction into any other portion of the great La Plata region. It revived under Jesuit auspices at Cordova, where towards the end of the seventeenth century a college had been founded by Duarte y Quiros, which had become the chief educational institution of the country. By 1765 it had attained sufficient consequence to become sensible of the inconvenience of being unable to print its theses and other academical documents, which, so wretched was the provision then made for the intellectual