Page:On the Difficulty of Correct Description of Books - De Morgan (1902).djvu/36

. Manuscrits ou appliqués avec de l'ancienne fonte, ces caractères jouent l'impression. Mais la fraude ne pense pas à tout: tandis que le titre falsifie annonçait une èdition de Plaisance, la dernière page révélait une èdition de Venise De tels faits ne se discutent pas, ils s'exposent." The supposition that a practiced bibliographer, desiring to falsify the place of printing, would forget that it is almost always at the end in very old books, is more amusing to those who are looking at the last pages of such books every day, than those who do not look into them can easily imagine. Their proverb ought to have been, la fraude ne pense à rien.

(3) We are not indebted, throughout this paper, to any one instance which was introduced in evidence before the Commissioners, either by ourselves or others.

[8] (4) If Granger had only looked into the 'Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors' by Horace Walpole, to whom his own work is dedicated, he would have seen an accurate title page of this work.

[9] (5) The best chance any reader will have of seeing this remarkable precursor of Copernicus, will be by looking for the second edition (Basle, 1566, folio) of Copernicus himself, to which it is attached. We have never seen either of the two separate and previous editions of the tract of Rheticus; but a letter from Gassarius of Lindau, prefixed to that of 1566, mentions the receipt of the first edition from Dantzig, and is dated 1540. So that neither Lalande nor Weidler is wrong on this point.

(6) There is reason to suppose that foreign books of second-rate name, travelled from one country to another, during the earlier years of printing, in larger numbers than now; that is, immediately after publication. At the present time, in the case of a book of no great note, published in France or Germany, hard-