PREFACE.

In editing the books of Galen that are inscribed Περὶ χρείας μορίων On the Usefulness of the Parts, I have used the following manuscripts:

1. Urbinati 69 (U). It is a parchment manuscript of the largest format, written in the tenth or eleventh century. It is well preserved, except for the fact that the final leaves have contracted damage from moisture or location, which has caused the words of the last lines to either vanish entirely or become heavily obscured. It contains one hundred and ninety-five leaves, or twenty-five quaternions a gathering of four sheets folded into eight leaves; with the loss of the five leaves of the twenty-fifth quaternion, the final part of the seventeenth book was lost. It ends at the words τὴν τ’ εἰς τὰ ζῷα πρόνοιαν αὐτῆς ἀφαιροῦνται. προβάλλοντες they take away its providence toward living creatures. putting forward (vol. IV p. 364 K). The quaternions are marked in the upper margin with Greek letters, and in the lower margin with so-called Arabic numerals added by a more recent hand. On individual pages, there are thirty-nine or forty-one lines each. The accent and breathing marks are very often missing; sometimes they have been added by a second hand. I have found the so-called subscript iota nowhere, and the adscript iota in only a few places. The scribe did not use shorthand abbreviations except for the most common ones. I personally collated books I—VI, VIII, XII, XIV, XV, and XVII in the year 1877; the others were collated by Fridericus Spiro in 1904.

The Urbinati is the oldest and also the best of all the manuscripts. It alone exhibits a great number of true readings. For example, I will cite these: p. 3, 14 (of this edition) ἐπὶ γῆς on earth, 5, 7 ἐκλύψαι to cover, 7, 9 ταῦτα these (likewise Theophilus), 9, 16 ἀντιλαμβάνεσθαι to grasp (likewise Theophilus), 11, 11 κορυφάς summits (likewise Hippocrates), 18, 8 ἀμφισβητεῖν κάλλους to dispute beauty, 23, 24 κλωμένων being broken, 31, 19 μηδαμῇ in no way, 85, 24 οἷ whither, 86, 26 διατιτράμενον being pierced through.