Produced by Louise Hope, David Starner and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net {Transcriber's Note: Except for footnote references, all brackets are in the original text. Material added by the transcriber is in {braces}. Typographical errors are listed at the end of the text.} A SIXTH-CENTURY FRAGMENT of the LETTERS OF PLINY THE YOUNGER A Study of Six Leaves of an Uncial Manuscript Preserved in the Pierpont Morgan Library New York by E. A. LOWE Associate of the Carnegie Institution of Washington Sandars Reader at Cambridge University (1914) Lecturer in Palaeography at Oxford University and E. K. RAND Professor of Latin in Harvard University [Illustration: CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON 1902] Published by the CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON Washington, 1922 CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON Publication No. 304 The University Press CAMBRIDGE, MASS. U. S. A. PREFATORY NOTE. The Pierpont Morgan Library, itself a work of art, contains masterpieces of painting and sculpture, rare books, and illuminated manuscripts. Scholars generally are perhaps not aware that it also possesses the oldest Latin manuscripts in America, including several that even the greatest European libraries would be proud to own. The collection is also admirably representative of the development of script throughout the Middle Ages. It comprises specimens of the uncial hand, the half-uncial, the Merovingian minuscule of the Luxeuil type, the script of the famous school of Tours, the St. Gall type, the Irish and Visigothic hands, and the Beneventan and Anglo-Saxon scripts. Among the oldest manuscripts of the library, in fact the oldest, is a hitherto unnoticed fragment of great significance not only to palaeographers, but to all students of the classics. It consists of six leaves of an early sixth-century manuscript of the _Letters_ of the younger Pliny. This new witness to the text, older by three centuries than the oldest codex heretofore used by any modern editor, has reappeared in this unexpected quarter, after centuries of wandering and hiding. The fragment was bought by the late J. Pierpont Morgan in Rome, in December 1910, from the art dealer Imbert; he had obtained it from De Marinis, of Florence, who had it from the heirs of the Marquis Taccone, of Naples. Nothing is known of the rest of the manuscript.