Natural History

so defiled by moisture, neglect, and also by remedies applied to revive faded letters that large parts can no longer be read, and it is mutilated from book XXI onwards with some leaves missing, truncated at the end after XXXII 135. It contains the entire text of this volume; indeed, the preface and I—III 38. 70—131. IV 6—VI 88 are of the first hand; the parts interspersed by the second, which corrected and supplied, are, except for a few paragraphs VI 148—152, those which a third hand wrote in the margin. Dübner collated the preface and I, Jan II and V, and Detlefsen the preface, I, III, IV, and VI—though the two types of corrections were not distinguished: for mingled with them are those that were made in the XIIth century from a codex of the older order (E²), and others, which show that third, much more recent hand (of the XVth or XVIth century), and in these they are so arranged that there is suspicion they were imported from printed editions. I recognized that this is partly correct thanks to Otto Rossbach, who, with his efforts offered to me of his own accord, examined over two hundred readings selected by me from books II and V in the codex E itself and explained them by describing them most minutely. He says that the third hand can for the most part be recognized by itself (which Rück also saw concerning the excerpts of Rob. Crickl. l. l. p. 216 n. 3, nor did Detlefsen deny it in the Jena Literary Journal 1874 p. 395) and that there is not even a need for it to be unfurled for the sake of confirmation.

e: The Parisian Latin codex 6796 A (for Sillig and Jan b): for this, since it was transcribed faithfully shortly after E had already been corrected by a second hand, is immune from the interpolations of the third. Where the writing of codex E has faded or been obscured, readings from e are rightly substituted and are noted in their places from the collations of Jan and Detlefsen.

a: The Vienna codex CCXXXIV (for Sillig and Jan ω), formerly of the monastery of St. Blaise in the Black Forest, a parchment manuscript, of the XIIth or XIIIth century—on May 8, 1278, it 'was lent to Rudolph, Bishop of Constance,' as the inscription on the first page testifies—written in two columns, divided into two volumes, of which the former contains the preface and I—XX, the other the following books up to XXXVII 203 wherever it is encompassed. From book X onwards, parts of the text have often been omitted by the scribes, it seems, more or less deliberately; the text of this first volume, however, has received almost no damage, except that VI 90—95 have fallen out, a column or one page of 41 lines being neglected by mistake. The preface and