and linen paper (_charta_ proper) as early as 1242 A.D.; but they were seldom used for Biblical manuscripts sooner than the thirteenth, and had not entirely displaced parchment at the era of the invention of printing, about A.D. 1450. Lost portions of parchment or vellum manuscripts are often supplied in paper by some later hand; but the Codex Leicestrensis of the fourteenth century is composed of a mixture of inferior vellum and worse paper, regularly arranged in the proportion of two parchment to three paper leaves, recurring alternately throughout the whole volume. Like it, in the mixture of parchment and paper, are codd. 233 and Brit. Mus. Harl. 3,161—the latter however not being a New Testament MS. 3. Although parchment was in occasional, if not familiar, use at the period when the New Testament was written (τὰ βιβλία, μάλιστα τὰς μεμβράνας 2 Tim. iv. 13), yet the more perishable papyrus of Egypt was chiefly employed for ordinary purposes. This vegetable production had been used for literary purposes from the earliest times. “Papyrus rolls are represented on the sculptured walls of Egyptian temples.” The oldest roll now extant is the papyrus Prisse at Paris, which dates from 2500 B.C., or even earlier, unless those which have been lately discovered by Mr. Flinders Petrie reach as far, or even farther, back(20). The ordinary name applied in Greek to this material was χάρτης (2 John 12), though Herodotus terms it βύβλος (ii. 100, v. 58), and in Latin _charta_ (2 Esdr. xv. 2; Tobit vii. 14—Old Latin Version). Papyrus was in those days esteemed more highly than skins: for Herodotus expressly states that the Ionians had been compelled to have recourse to goats and sheep for lack of byblus or papyrus; and Eumenes was driven to prepare parchment because the Alexandrians were too jealous to supply him with the material which he coveted(21). Indeed, papyrus was used far beyond the borders of Egypt, and was plentiful in Rome under the Empire, being in fact the common material among the Romans during that period: and as many of the manuscripts of the New Testament must have been written upon so perishable a substance in the earliest centuries since the Christian era, this probably is one of the reasons why we possess no considerable copies from before the second quarter of the fourth century. Only a few fragments of the New Testament on papyrus remain. We find a minute, if not a very clear description of the mode of preparing the papyrus for the scribe in the works of the elder Pliny (Hist. Nat. xiii. 11, 12). The plant grew in Egypt, also in Syria, and on the Niger and the Euphrates. Mainly under Christian influence it was supplanted by parchment and vellum, which had superior claims to durability, and its manufacture ceased altogether on the conquest of Egypt by the Mohammedans (A.D. 638).