Astronomicon

in M; but one of those titles was inserted in consequence of the transposition and therefore after it, and so were at least three—in my opinion five—of the verses themselves. The genuine verses, existing at the time of the transposition, are 81 or fewer, and the addition of two titles will make only 84 lines at most; so that if the leaves transposed were leaves of the archetype they cannot have had 44 lines apiece. The leaves actually transposed, leaves of the archetype’s ancestor, probably had: at any rate there is nothing to forbid that supposition, and I will give a conjectural picture of their contents.

That the verses between 563 and 567, since lost and therefore absent from the archetype, were 9 in number is a conjecture based on the common assumption of a leaf of 44 lines; but that some verses have been lost at that point is certain.A verse has probably been lost also after 560, as Jacob saw; but that may have happened earlier. They contained Eudoxus’ division of the distance between the poles into 30 parts, without which the following verses 567–593 would have been unintelligible. Why they exist no more, which of many possible accidents swept them away, there is no means of determining.

The transposition of these two leaves brought 567I formerly, on p. 53 of my first volume, expelled 567, together with the spurious 566, for an insufficient reason, declaring at the same time that it was quite a good verse in itself. Let me also here call attention to the correction, on pp. 116 sq. of this volume, of the words ‘iterum scripti 566 567’ in my note on I 529. into immediate contact with 612: there it stood in the archetype, and