The Egyptian Language Restored

PREFACE.

original: "They judge this very irrationally" up to "since it is very great, we shall say to him [the text is missing in the manuscript].*"

A third codex from Nuremberg, seemingly from the fourteenth century, has been added, as evidenced by Fabricius (B. G. Vol. IV, page 40, edited by Harl.). J. Chr. Kappius, the editor of Aristotle’s treatise De Mundo On the World, had prepared a new edition of Cleomedes and had gathered an excellent and clean manuscript from the Nuremberg library along with others, but, intercepted by premature fate, he left that task to others. For this reason, we decided to take up the thread begun by Kappius, such that we might elaborate on the collation of this codex as well and consult it in doubtful passages. Without a doubt, it should be ascribed to the family of more recent manuscripts, as numerous interpolations demonstrate, which is why we have rarely altered the text based on its authority.

Equipped with these aids for emendation, and having examined the text of Cleomedes—as edited by Bake in 1820 and by C. Th. Chr. Schmidt in 1832, which depends entirely on the former—repeatedly and often, we proposed a twofold duty for ourselves: first, to express as accurately as possible the reading of the Medicean manuscript, as it is the oldest of all the codices we inspected**; and second, to remove, as far as possible, the errors arising from the negligence of scribes and the corruptions from which even that best of codices is not free, with the help of two others. Thus, we dared to apply a remedy to the author cautiously and providently, and we deliberately neglected all other codices that we did not examine ourselves and for which we could not make a certain judgment regarding their age.

*) We discussed these matters more accurately in a dissertation titled: "On the Life and Writings of Cleomedes," Meissen, 1878, 8vo.
**) The manuscripts of the Marcian Library, No. CCXIV and CCCVIII, which Villoison (loc. cit.) assigns to the XI–XII century, are written in the XIV–XV century, like six others that contain the writings.