Note 31 — Classification.

One curious service of printers' blunders, of a character quite distinct from their bibliological influence, is their use in detecting plagiarisms. It may seem strange that there should be any difficulty in critically determining the question, when the plagiarism is so close as to admit of this test; but there are pieces of very hard work in science, tables of reference, and the like, where, if two people go through the same work, they will come to the same conclusion. In such cases, the prior worker has sometimes identified his own by a blunder, as he would a stolen china vase by a crack. Peignot complains that some thirty or forty pages of his Dictionnaire Bibliographique were incorporated in the Siècles Littéraires de la France, "avec une exactitude si admirable, qu'on y a precieusement conservé toutes les fautes typographiques."