PREFACE

L m s - v r f r w L o s g r?

With this volume at last completed, the first Teubner edition of the Natural History ceases to be deficient in part of its own, and the whole work now stands forth, organized into a new form with a consistent plan. That I did not accomplish this before all copies of the first volume—which had been overseen by Jahn—were sold out, was hindered not only by other occupations, which it serves no purpose to recount here, but by the difficulty of the task itself and a labor far greater and more arduous than in any of the other volumes. Yet I do not regret this unexpected delay; for in the meantime, truly desired resources have come to me: both the booklets of Rück, composed with exceptional diligence and learning concerning some of Pliny’s excerptors, useful for illustrating certain connections among the codices hitherto somewhat hidden, and the new edition of the geographical books by Detlefsen, containing richer apparatuses of critical material brought forth from the recesses of the archives. I congratulate myself that this latter work appeared in public this very year, before the typesetters, having already begun the work, reached Book III of my edition, even though an infinite labor of expanding or even reweaving the commentary had to be undertaken as a result. For I found that not a few things I had innovated in the text were confirmed by consensus rather than preempted from me, and it was possible to supply the variety of readings—which I had regretted in many places not having fully ascertained—in such a way that you would scarcely desire anything from those things which pertain to examining the memory of the codices and the conformation of the text. In these, some things could have been omitted without prejudice, had I not learned from the collations of codices R and F, performed by Jahn and myself, that they had hitherto been presented and corrected less correctly. Furthermore, the breadth of the commentary has increased through almost constant mention of previous editions, the readings of which...