ecclesiastical terms, showing the close association between the printers and the other foremost scholars of the fifteenth century—the clerical scribes—who were gradually superseded by the printing press. Thus we have in sizes of type, “brevier,” “pica,” and “canon”; in the office arrangements the “chapel,” with its “father,” and the “devil”; while the black smudges and grey patches in bad presswork are respectively “monks” and “friars.” Even where there was no such allusion, we have in the word “quadrates” (shortened to “quads” by the modern workmen), applied to the large blanks used to fill out a line, a wholly different method of nomenclature from that which in late years has given us such forms as “bridging,” “hammering,” and “slating”—slang expressions well understood in the trade, wholly meaningless to an outsider, and which, so far, have never figured in any glossary. The difficulty of tracing a technical term to its root was well illustrated lately by an interesting discussion as to the origin of the word “flong”—the name by which the moulding material in the papier-mache process of stereotyping is universally known. It is only about forty years since the process was invented, but the derivation of the word is uncertain. One ingenious writer, finding that “flong” was an old English form of the verb “fling,” suggested this obsolete word as the original of the term, the mould being “flung” on the type, and beaten down (Swedish flenga) with a brush. But modern workmen do not hunt up forgotten Teutonic forms wherewith to coin technical terms. “With greater probability another suggested the French flan, “a thin, soft cake or custard” (English form, “flawn”), to which the moulding material bears some resemblance. This theory met with wide acceptance, the process having been first followed in France. Another, and I think the correct, suggestion is simpler still, that “flong” is merely a corruption of the French fluant, “blotting-paper,” of which the material is chiefly composed. If so much doubt exists as to the origin of a term not fifty years old, one must be cautious indeed in speculating about terms which came into being when printing was not only an art, but a mystery. First, I will briefly explain the words, for we must examine their meaning before we can hope to understand their origin. “Kern” is a word from the type-foundry, but is as old as the period when every printer cast his own type. Ordinary letters stand square within the four corners of the type on which they are cast, are fully supported, and do not overhang. But certain letters, especially those cast on the slope, like scripts and italics, overhang the body and overlap each