inner margin, to receive those portions of the common text which Griesbach has rejected, and such variations of his authorities as he judges to be of equal weight with the received readings which he retains, or but little inferior to them. These decisions he intimates by several symbols, not quite so simple as those employed by Bengel, but conceived in a similar spirit; and he has carried his system somewhat further in his small or manual edition, published at Leipzig in 1805, which may be conceived to represent his last thoughts with regard to the recension of the Greek text of the N. T. But though we may trace some slight discrepancies of opinion between his earliest(225) and his latest works(226), as might well be looked for in a literary career of forty years, yet the theory of his youth was maintained, and defended, and temperately applied by Griesbach even to the last. From Bengel and Semler he had taken up the belief that manuscripts, versions, and ecclesiastical writers divide themselves, with respect to the character of their testimony, into races or families. This principle he strove to reduce to practice by marshalling all his authorities under their respective heads, and then regarding the evidence, not of individuals, but of the classes to which they belong. The advantage of some such arrangement is sufficiently manifest, if only it could be made to rest on grounds in themselves certain, or, at all events, fairly probable. We should then possess some better guide in our choice between conflicting readings, than the very rough and unsatisfactory process of counting the _number_ of witnesses produced on either side. It is not that such a mode of conducting critical enquiries would not be very convenient, that Griesbach’s theory is universally abandoned by modern scholars, but because there is no valid reason for believing it to be true.