separate prints of dots, lines, or angles, which gave them a different meaning. The imperfection of the process is obvious, for it required the destruction of many matrices and punches.
The difficulties in the way of using types, if they could be made with advantage, are too great to be overlooked: they could not be classified nor handled with economy. The American compositor picks types from cases with boxes for 152 characters, and covering an area of 1088 square inches; but experts in type-setting say that the American case is too large, and that the speed of the compositor would be much increased by reducing the area of the case. The performance of the compositor decreases with an increase in the size of case and in the number of characters. To provide for 80,000 Chinese characters, cases covering an area of 550,000 square inches would be required. In other words, the Chinese compositor would need the room occupied by five hundred cases; he would unavoidably waste the largest portion of his time walking through alleys in search of types, and vainly trying to recollect the places where he had distributed them.
The Chinese are not entirely insensible to the advantages of European typography. There is a story current in books on printing, that Jesuit missionaries, during the latter part of the seventeenth century, cast 250,000 Chinese characters in the form of movable types.[1] Here is an obvious error: if we consider the work done afterward with these types, the quantity stated is altogether too small for the types and too large for the punches. It is further said that the Jesuit missionaries, with the permission of the reigning emperor,
- ↑ To this description of Chinese typography is usually added the untrue statement that the types were made of copper. Why the Jesuit missionaries, who were amateurs in type-founding, should add to their labors by the use of such a troublesome and slowly melted metal as copper, when European type-founders preferred lead, tin and antimony, cannot be explained. I cannot find a copy of the original statement, which was, no doubt, in Latin. The phrase, types of copper, is, probably, an incorrect translation, a repetition of the error explained in a note on page 65 of this book. The missionaries intended to say, and no doubt did say, that they made types in copper, or in copper matrices.
