6. Far more important than these are such variations in orthography as bear upon the dialect of the N. T. Its affinity to the Septuagint is admitted on all hands, the degree of that affinity must depend on the influence we grant to certain very old manuscripts of the N. T., which abound in Alexandrian forms for the most part absent in the great mass of codices. Such are the verbal terminations -αμεν, -ατε, -αν in the plural of the second aorist indicative, -οσαν for -ον in the plural imperfect or second aorist, -ουσαν for -ουν, -αν for -ασι of the perfect, -άτω for -έτω, -ατο for -ετο, -άμενος for -όμενος. In nouns the principal changes are -αν for -α in the accusative of the third declension, and (more rarely) the converse α for -αν in the first(329). We have conceded to these forms the name of Alexandrian, because it is probable that they actually derived their origin from that city(330), whose dialectic peculiarities the Septuagint had propagated among all Jews that spoke Greek; although some of them, if not the greater part, have been clearly traced to other regions; as for example -αν for -ασι to Western Asia Minor also and to Cilicia (Scholz, Commentatio, p. 9, notes w, x), occurring too in the Pseudo-Homeric “Batrachomyomachia” (ἐπεὶ κακὰ πολλά μ᾽ ἔοργαν, ver. 179). Now when we come to examine our manuscripts closely we find the forms we have enumerated not quite banished from the most recent, but appearing far more frequently in such copies as אABC (especially D) LZ than in those of lower date. It has been usual to ascribe such anomalous (or, at all events, unclassical) inflexions to the circumstance that the first-rate codices were written in Egypt; but an assumption which might be plausible in the case of two or three is improbable as regards them all; it will not apply at all to those Greek-Latin manuscripts which must have been made in the West, or to the cursives in which such forms are sparsely met with, but which were certainly not copied from _surviving_ uncials(331). Thus we are led to the conclusion that the older documents retained these irregularities, because they were found in _their_ prototypes, the copies first taken from the sacred originals: that some of them were in all likelihood the production of the skilful scribes of Alexandria, though their exhibiting these forms does not prove the fact, or even render it very probable: and that the sacred penmen, some perhaps more than others, but all to some extent, were influenced by their recollections and habitual use of the Septuagint version. Our practical inference from the whole discussion will be, not that Alexandrian inflexions should be invariably or even usually received into the text, as some recent editors have been inclined to do, but that they should be judged separately in every case on their merits and the support adduced in their behalf; and be held entitled to no other indulgence than that a