Natural History

troublesome for one about to edit. Although I have taken pains to faithfully protect the writing of the codices and to mend names and numbers probably with a gentle remedy—having assiduously collated the text of the books and explored the numbers by calculating, as far as it could be done—I am mindful, however, of how far I am from appearing to have restored Pliny's hand: I hope for this one thing, that my work may not be judged to have been altogether sterile and empty. Harduinus was the first to begin to lead the way on this path, as I indicated on p. 97, following certain Parisian codices, but he transposed some headings, changed others, and supplied from many that were fabricated and inserted by himself what seemed to him to be missing. With the matter taken up anew, Sillig, with more and better resources, bound himself more strictly by the authority of the codices and, although he did not manage many individual things correctly, having not sufficiently discerned the intricate nature of the codices, he nevertheless stabilized the foundations of the recension as a whole. Subsequently, Ian corrected some things, and erred in others, when he attributed too much to the codices dT, being rightly criticized for this by Vrlichs in Fleckeisen’s Annals I, XXI, pp. 257 sqq. Finally, Detlefsen, having used an apparatus greatly amplified, approached most closely to the ancient form of the indices, though leaving behind certain things in which he did not advance beyond the findings of Ian. Indeed, the ancient editors before Harduin had received the indices of authors only as they were almost complete from the codices, and had provided them interpolated by variously changing, adding to, cutting, or otherwise ordering the headings of the subjects, so that clearly new and foreign indices were circulated, which it is likely—unless the traces visible in the final books of codex a deceive—were compiled at his own whim by some learned man of the middle ages in some exemplar.

EXPLANATION OF NOTES

a. = before.
add. = adds, they add, by adding.
coni. = conjectured, conjecture.
corr. = corrected, correction.
del. = I deleted, he deleted, by deleting.
dist. = I distinguished, he distinguished.
lac. = a lacuna.
ll. = the manuscripts ADF RdEa, as many as have been collated in each place and indicated by sigla in the upper margin of each page.
om. = omitted, by omitting.
praem. = having placed before.