His

to avail himself of the many appliances which modern inventors find ready to their hand at every turn, for they were nonexistent, and he had therefore to realize his designs the best way he could, without revealing their object to those whom he employed to carry them into execution. partners indeed might know that a new kind of block or book printing was intended, but yet be ignorant of the real purpose for which the costly and still unfinished machines were meant; for it is evident, judging from the depositions of Anthonie Heilmann, concerning the formen, ('frames or models'), and of others who speak of presses (pressen) in the plural, that more than one had been planned. Unless such knowledge had been imparted to them, and was further supported by specimens of block Alphabets, school Grammars, and Vocabularies, it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand how their faith in the ultimate success of "the wonderful

art," could have been so long sustained. Now, bearing in mind that three hundred and seventy years later, it cost a practical printer and engineer, aided by other men's ideas, and by every facility which science could give for the quick and accurate production of whatever his ingenuity designed, no less than seven years of labour, and an outlay on the part of his employers of £16,000, before he achieved success in the first cylindrical printing machine; a machine which was merely required to print off sheets more rapidly than could be done by the hand-press; the marvel is, not that Gutenberg's invention cost him the time and labour and money it did; but that in realizing his ideas, he perfected them so thoroughly, that the principles of his hand-press

KOENIG'S cylinder machine, erected for Mr. BENSLEY the eminent printer, and first set in operation in April 1811, at the manufactory in Whitecross-street, London; when it printed 3000 sheets of the Annual Register, to the admiration of all who saw it at work.

have not to this day been improved. Different adaptations of leverage power may have been tried to produce the same effects, and different materials made use of in the manufacture of the machinery, but the handpress of to-day is essentially the same as that with which the first Typographer printed his first book. The greater therefore is the honor due to its inventor.

The annexed sketch represents a press in its completed form, with tympans attached to the end of the carriage, and with the frisket above the tympans. The tympans, inner and outer, are thin iron frames, one fitting into the other, on each of which is stretched a skin of parchment or a breadth of fine cloth. A woollen blanket or two with a few sheets of paper are placed between these, the whole thus forming a thin elastic pad, on which the sheet to be printed is laid. The frisket is a slender frame-work, covered with coarse paper, on which an impression is first

taken; the whole of the printed part is then cut out, leaving apertures exactly corresponding with the pages of type on the carriage of the press. The frisket when folded on to the tympans, and both turned down over the forme of types and run in under the platten, preserves the sheet from contact with any thing but the inked surface of the types, when the pull, which brings down the screw and forces the platten to produce the impression, is made by the pressman who works the lever,-to whom is facetiously given the title of "the practitioner at the bar."

One of the consequences that ensued on the termination of the lawsuit with the Dritzehens, was a stoppage of the progress of the invention. Very probably Gutenberg, an impoverished if not a disappointed man, felt compelled to lay his projects aside, and to devote himself, for a time at least, to other and more remunerative pursuits. Nothing more at any rate is heard of the partnership, or of types or presses, until after his return to Mentz. And as printing was not practised at Strasburg until after Mentelin set up a press there, this silence is pretty conclusive as to the correctness of the surmise, that neither Dritzehen Heilmann nor

Riffe had been entrusted with the secret of

the separable types.

The inference which writers adverse to the claims of Gutenberg draw from the silence in the evidence in regard to types or letters, is, that he had not then invented them. But if the press was not designed, and made, for