It is not easy to determine why the name of _Peshitto_, “Simple,” “Common,” should have been given to the oldest Syriac version of Scripture, to distinguish it from others that were subsequently made(11). In comparison with the Harkleian it is the very reverse of a close rendering of the original. Perhaps the title refers to its common and popular use(12). We shall presently submit to the reader a few extracts from it, contrasted with the same passages in other Syriac versions; for the present we can but assent to the ripe judgement of Michaelis, who, after thirty years’ study of its contents, declared that he could consult no translation with so much confidence in cases of difficulty and doubt(13). 2. The Curetonian Syriac. The volume which contained the greater part of the Curetonian portions of the Gospels was brought by Archdeacon Tattam in 1842 from the Monastery of St. Mary Deipara in the Nitrian Desert (p. 140). Eighty leaves and a half were picked out by Dr. Cureton, then one of the officers in the Manuscript department of the British Museum, from a mass of other matter which had been bound up with them by unlearned possessors, and comprise the Additional MS. 14,451 of the Library they adorn, and two more reached England in 1847. They are in quarto, with two columns on a page, in a bold hand and the Estrangelo or old Syriac character, on vellum originally very white, the single points for stops, some titles, &c. being in red ink; there are no marks of Church Lessons by the first hand, which Cureton (a most competent judge) assigned to the middle of the fifth century. The fragments contain Matt. i. 1-viii. 22; x. 32-xxiii. 25; Mark xvi. 17-20; John i. 1-42; iii. 5-vii. 37; (but many words in iii. 6-iv. 6 are illegible); xiv. 10-12; 15-19; 21-23; 26-29; Luke ii. 48-iii. 16; vii. 33-xv. 21; xvii. 23-xxiv. 44, or 1786 verses, so arranged that St. Mark’s Gospel is here immediately followed by St. John’s. Three more leaves of this version (part, perhaps, of the same MS.) were found among the Syriac MSS. procured by Dr. Sachau, and now at Berlin (Royal Libr. Orient. quart. 528). They contain Luke xv. 22-xvi. 12; xvii. 1-23; John vii. 37-52; viii. 12-19. They were published by Roediger (Monatsbericht, Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences, July, 1872), and were privately printed by the late Professor Wright to range with Cureton’s volume. Within the last year the discovery has been announced of another Curetonian MS., which was found in the Library of the Convent on Mount Sinai by Mrs. Lewis. An edition of it is now in progress, but will not be published soon enough for notice in this work. The Syriac text of the London MS. was printed in fine Estrangelo type in 1848, and freely imparted to such scholars as might need its help; but it was not till 1858 that the work was published(14), with a very literal translation into rather bald English, a beautiful and exact facsimile (Luke xv. 11-13; 16-19) by Mrs. Cureton, and a Preface (pp.