At this point, as we have already observed, printing would have stepped, if the art of alphabetic writing had remained undiscovered. At most, the art could not have been carried beyond what has been called logography, or the printing with types, each containing a whole word, a method which is in partial use in China, and has even in recent times been attempted among ourselves, but which is manifestly of very limited application. Logography, indeed, is merely a modification of block-printing; the principle is the same whether the block or type contain a whole word, a whole line, a whole sentence, or a whole page.
It is not unlikely, however, that the partial employment of logo graphy in the infancy of European printing may have been what suggested alphabetic printing. There is good evidence that some words of common occurrence were early cut out on separate stamps or types ; and although this may have been done only after the invention of alphabetic printing, to save the trouble of composition (or setting up the words from the letters), it is possible that the same thing may also have been done while only block-printing was known, with the view of saving the repeated cutting out of the same words. If so, the per ception, thus awakened and turned to account, of the fact that two different pages often contained some words in common, would he apt, it may be thought, to conduct to the reflection that all words and all pages that could be printed were composed out of the same twenty four letters, and that therefore if a sufficient number of types consist ing each of a single letter could be provided, the same types that had been made use of in printing any one page might, with the mere trouble of re-arrangement, be made to servo for printing any other. 11 ere was what we may call quite a now principle. Logography was indeed the employment to a certain extent of moveable types; but the prin ciple of moveable type printing was no more there than we can say the principle of alphabetic, writing Is to be found in the 214 radical charac ters of the Chinese. The universality which is the mecum of a principle is equally wanting in both cases.
Yet, whether it may have been arrived at through the medium of logrtgniphy or not, it may be safely affirmed that, where alphabetio writing was known, alphabetic printing could not be long in being found out. It was in fact., in a manner, already invented, in the co existence of pigment printing on the one hand, and of alphnbetic writing on the other ; for it was the more resultant, without the assistance of any third element, of the combination of these two ideas.
Not that even this simple combination would of necessity be Mune diately made; the history of discovery sufficiently attests that it will often be a considerable time before a third thing is thought of which would be at once accomplished by the mere bringing together, and into simultaneous and accordant action, of two things already familiarly known and practised ; but still, fortuitously, or through reflection and experiment, the new idea is much more likely to be struck out in these circumstances than if a more complex combination were required to produce it, and, especially where the state of society supplies any considerable stimulus to the attainment of it, cannot be very long in being arrived at.
The conunou art of printing, in essentially the same degree of com pleteness in which we now possess it, had certainly been discovered before the middle of the 15th century; but when, where, and by whom each successive improvement of the original pigment-printing by means of engraved blocks was discovered and first put in practice is not so easily settled. The employment of moveable types, the pro. duction of such types by the process of casting them in metal, and the formation of the matrix, or mould, by means of the punch, or stamp of hardened steel by which the matrix ie impressed or hollowed out ; these, disregarding mere mechanical facilitations, may be considered as the three great organic changes by which block-printing was trans. formed into the art as it now exists. They are far, indeed, from being upon a level in point of importance ; they descend in value in the order in which we have enumerated them, which must also have been the order in which they followed each other; and the third contributes so little to the completion of the invention, as compared with either the first or second, that we might perhaps without much injustice omit it altogether. Pigment stamping, the breaking up of the block-page into single letters, the substitution of letters of east metal for those of cut wood, and the production of many' matrices from one punch, the four successive steps oonatituting the invention of printing, have thus all one end and aim. This very circumstance might enable one of them in a groat measure to suggest the next.