37). All who have inspected the Codex are loud in their praises of the fine thin vellum, the clear and elegant hand of the first penman, the simplicity of the whole style of the work: capital letters, so frequent in the Codex Alexandrinus, were totally wanting in this document for some centuries. In several of these particulars our manuscript resembles the Herculanean rolls, and thus asserts a just claim to high antiquity, which the absence of the divisions into κεφάλαια, of the sections and canons, and the substitution in their room of another scheme of chapters of its own (described above, p. 56), beyond question tend very powerfully to confirm. Each column contains ordinarily forty-two lines(135), each line from sixteen to eighteen letters, of a size somewhat less than in Cod. A, much less than in Cod. א (though they all vary a little in this respect), with no intervals between words, a space of the breadth of half a letter being left at the end of a sentence, and a little more at the conclusion of a paragraph; the first letter of the new sentence occasionally standing a little out of the line (_see_ pp. 51, 93). It has been doubted whether any of the stops are _primâ manu_, and (contrary to the judgement of Birch and others) the breathings and accents are now universally allowed to have been added by a later hand. This hand, referred by some to the eighth century (although Tischendorf, with Dr. Hort’s approval, assigns it to the tenth or eleventh(136)), retraced, with as much care as such an operation would permit, the faint lines of the original writing (the ink whereof was perhaps never quite black), the remains of which can even now be seen by a keen-sighted reader by the side of the thicker and more modern strokes; and, anxious at the same time to represent a critical revision of the text, the writer left untouched such words or letters as he wished to reject. In these last places, _where no breathings or accents and scarcely any stops_(137)_ have ever been detected_, we have an opportunity of seeing the manuscript in its primitive condition, before it had been tampered with by the later scribe. There are occasional breaks in the continuity of the writing, every descent in the genealogies of our Lord (Matt. i, Luke iii(138)), each of the beatitudes (Matt. v), of the parables in Matt. xiii, and the salutations of Rom. xvi, forming a separate paragraph; but such a case will oftentimes not occur for several consecutive pages. The writer’s plan was to proceed regularly with a book until it was finished: then to break off from the column he was writing, and to begin the next book on the very next column. Thus only _one_ column perfectly blank is found in the whole New Testament(139), that which follows ἐφοβοῦντο γάρ in Mark xvi. 8: and since Cod. B is the only one yet known, except Cod. א, that actually omits the last twelve verses of that Gospel, by leaving such a space the scribe has intimated that he was fully