The Complete Extant Works of Theophrastus, Vol. I

He was followed by J. G. Schneider, who, after comparing the Medicean, Viennese, and later the Urbinate codices, and using aids of every kind, was the first to make it possible for the books of Theophrastus to be read and understood. But since it happened by cruel fate that he received the variant readings of the Urbinate codex only after the first four volumes of his edition had already been printed—a codex by whose help the text could be rendered much fuller and purer—he took care to propose its readings and the correction of those books according to the norm of this reading in the fifth volume. Thus, it came about that you cannot use the edition of Schneider without the greatest inconvenience; indeed, the work of correcting the text of Theophrastus did not seem to be complete through the efforts of Schneider. This moved me to propose a new edition of the Histories in 1842, in which I attempted to exhibit the text as corrected as possible and to set forth all that is called the critical apparatus accurately and conveniently. I applied the same care also to the Causes of Plants, the part of which, however, has not yet had an opportunity to be published.

The codices of the books of Theophrastus on plants are compared as follows: The Urbinate, of the Vatican Library no. 61, on parchment, in small folio, is the most ancient of all that are known and excels all in quality. The two Mediceans, which are to be considered as one, rarely disagreeing, of the Laurentian Library in Florence, Plut. 85 cod. 4 and cod. 23, on parchment in quarto, are slightly better than the following ones, but much inferior to the Urbinate. The Viennese, of the Imperial Viennese Library, no. 49, contains books I–V of the Histories and two chapters of the sixth. It holds the last place among our codices. The Parisian, of the Imperial Parisian Library no. 2069, on paper, whose readings I compared in the books of the Histories. Furthermore, I received from codex no. 1823 of the Imperial Parisian Library a transcript of an excerpt from the Theophrastean books, which, having originated from an ancient and good codex, shows many excellent readings which it provides either alone or with the Urbinate. Far inferior to all these codices were those used by Theodorus Gaza, whose Latin version was printed at Treviso by Bartholomeus Confalonerium de Saladio in the year 1483, and Aldus Manutius in the first Greek edition. Furthermore, it is established by clear arguments that Gaza did not follow his codex closely, and clear traces of the critical art, though applied very lightly, are detected in the readings of the Aldine.