Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: I. WRITING, XYLOGRAPHY AND TYPOGRAPHY. Every revolution in history is the result of a long preparation, the necessary fruit of time, and has as condition the causes which bring it about. This law of history, observed by every one in the religious revolution of the first centuries of the Christian era, in the ecclesiastical revolution of the 16th century, in the social revolution of 1789, is forgotten whenever there is question of the invention of typography. " How is it possible that it was not invented earlier?" is the exclamation of popular surprise, the fact being that it did not appear earlier for the same reason that Christianity did not arise earlier, that America was not discovered earlier, and that the Church was not revolutionized some centuries earlier. No scientific man asks how it is possible that Luther was not born earlier, that the feudal system did not fall to pieces earlier. And yet the invention of typography is something more than all revolutions : an event, therefore, which could only be born from " the fulness of time." It has waited already much too long for a purely scientific treatment. For my present task, however, it will suffice to give a sketch of the event and its cause, and of its connexion with the literary development of the middle ages, in order to enable the reader sufficiently to judge of the value of the fable, which represents typography, only long after, and in opposition to history, as having been invented at Haarlem. This fable, which rests on nothing but an artificially and deceptively-fostered popular belief, deserves to be struck at last by the justice of criticism. But it must be placed immediately in the light of history, in order to make its utter worthlessness manifest. I will, therefore, sum up as .many of the facts as will ...