so on until the word is distributed. The small letters are placed in the lower case. The words are read upside down; but practice makes perfect, and a good workman will distribute 40,000 letters in a day. He separates them indeed almost as rapidly as he can pass his hand over the case. When the case is full, the compositor commences composing. For this purpose he stands in front of the case, in the centre of its length, at X, and holds in his hand a composing-stick.

In this instrument the letters are arranged into words and lines. It is from seven to ten inches long, and is generally made of iron. The ledge A A is a slide secured by the screw B, and the holes are for the purpose of

moving the screw and the slide. The slide is used for making the space D wider or narrower, according to the width of the page which is to be printed. The width of this space is the width of the page. The stick is held in the left hand, the forefinger being bent under it, pointing towards the compositor, so that the thumb may be over the slider into the space D. In other words, the stick rests on the fingers and part of the palm of the hand. A piece of thin brass (called a setting-rule) having been placed inside against the ledge F to support the letters, the compositor with the right hand selects the letters he requires from the cases. For instance, if we were going to compose the words "London is a vast city," he would take a capital L from the upper case, and place it in the left-hand corner of the stick; then putting his left thumb upon it to hold it firm, he picks up o from the lower case, ranges that next to L, and proceeds in the same way, until he has ranged the whole of the letters of the word London. Next, he places a space to make the division between "London," and the next word "is," and then he proceeds letter by letter until the line is finished. If the words in the line fill it exactly, nothing remains to be done but to ascertain that the words are correctly spelt, and to make the line tight, by inserting a thick or thin space as may be necessary; if there is not room for the whole

of the last word, part of it is turned over into the next line, or if it is a word which will not admit of being divided, such as "through," the spacing (that is, the distances between the words) is lessened, so as to get it in, or it is increased so as to fill the line without it, and drive it over into the next line. But before tightening the line, the compositor reads over the type to see if he has left out any of the words, or put in any twice over, or if he has spelt them correctly; and as the letters of different founts will get mixed, he runs his left thumb along the front of the letters to feel, if they are all of the same fount. In doing this, too, he is assisted by notches called nicks, which are cut in the body of the type. Each fount has a particular nick, consisting of one, two, or three notches cut in a particular part of the body of the letter, so that when the letters are arranged in a line so many grooves are formed. By this simple contrivance the compositor is enabled to see at a glance, and even to feel without seeing, whether any of the letters are turned the wrong way, or whether any of them are of the wrong fount, because the lines of the grooves are interrupted. Supposing, then, the letter is a three-nick letter, the appearance of the lines will be as follows:

H

If, however, any of the letters are turned the wrong way, or any wrong founts are mixed, the appearance will be similar to this:

The first line of the copy having been completed, the compositor removes the piece of brass, of which we have already spoken, from the back of the type to the front of it. Its use now is not merely to support the letters, but its smooth and even surface facilitates the ranging of them. The process of composing may seem a tedious one, but it really is not so; for while the fingers are travelling to the letter wanted next, take it out of the box,"

and convey it to the stick, the eye glances at the copy, which is placed on the upper case in a line with it, where it is most readily seen; and thus the compositor proceeds, alternately selecting with his eye a letter which lies in a convenient position to be picked up, picking it up with his fingers, while glancing at his copy, and accumulating line after line with considerable expedition. A good compositor will "set" 12,000 of pica letters in a day.

Several machines have been constructed for composing types. One of these was shown at the Great Exhibition in 1851, and is now at work in a newspaper office in Denmark. Another has been invented by a gentleman named Wiberg, of Lund, in Sweden, who, at the time we write, is about to visit England, with the view of getting it into use. A third invention, which comprehends a complete change in the whole system of printing, was exhibited during the year 1853, in London, by Major Beniowski. We will endeavour to explain the principles of the new process, which is a combination of logography and mechanism. Some of the types consist of single letters, like the ordinary types; others have a space attached to them. A space, as we have already described, is a piece of metal having no letter on it, and therefore shorter than the other types, used to create the blanks which separate the words of a sentence. In a line of ten words there are about fifty letters and ten spaces, and to pick up each space re