On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, Vol. I

will find something that may seem strange to them. For example, the entire method of the Prolegomena seems to smack too much of the Palaeography treated in previous centuries. But how could it have been instituted otherwise, if, as almost everyone would concede, it was necessary in an edition that was the first to be concerned with recognizing the text to set forth under one view and demonstrate with clear examples both what kind of text previous editions had handed down and how much, or how little, help was to be sought from the manuscripts that have survived to our time? Then, they should not wonder if they find in the Prolegomena some things said to be emended by me, which they will read in the critical annotation as emended by Cornarius Janus Cornarius, a 16th-century philologist. The reason for this is that the Prolegomena had already begun to be printed when the emendations of Cornarius, which are inscribed on the margin of a copy of the Aldine a print edition by the Aldine Press edition preserved in the Jena academic library, came into my hands, from which I learned that many of his corrections agree with mine; therefore, it remained for me to assign to Cornarius in the critical annotation those things into which I myself had also stumbled. I thought the same should be done in many other emendations which I did not mention in the Prolegomena, holding it a matter of conscience not to claim as a product of my own genius something that that predecessor had discovered. But as I believe I have easily escaped the charge of vanity, it will seem less easy for me to clear myself to two others: a certain inconsistency and negligence. For there will be those who notice that I was not sufficiently consistent in those things pertaining to Greek and Latin orthography, nor diligent in correcting the mistakes of the typesetters, since I did not see that accents and spirits were missing in not a few Greek words. I hear you; but it happened very rarely that I was not consistent in my writing, and it could not even be avoided everywhere, for instance in the passages cited by Galen from Hippocrates, whose writing is not consistent even in the best manuscripts; the latter was not the fault of the typesetters, whose diligence I judge to be worthy of great praise, nor of the Leipzig correctors, whose accuracy I judge to be worthy of great praise, nor was it my fault,