[Footnote 3: The scribe wrote _dissitientis_. A contemporary hand changed the second _i_ to _e_ and wrote an _n_ above the _t_.] [Footnote 4: _de_ is cancelled by means of dots above the _d_ and _e_ and oblique strokes drawn through them.] [Footnote 5: The strokes over the _i_ at the end of this word and at the beginning of the next were added by a corrector who can not be much older than the thirteenth century.] PART II. THE TEXT OF THE MORGAN FRAGMENT by E. K. RAND THE MORGAN FRAGMENT AND ALDUS’S ANCIENT CODEX PARISINUS.[1] [Sidenote: _The Codex Parisinus_] Aldus Manutius, in the preface to his edition of Pliny’s _Letters_, printed at Venice in 1508, expresses his gratitude to Aloisio Mocenigo, Venetian ambassador in Paris, for bringing to Italy an exceptionally fine manuscript of the _Letters_; the book had been found not long before at or near Paris by the architect Fra Giocondo of Verona. The _editio princeps_, 1471, was based on a family of manuscripts that omitted Book VIII, called Book IX Book VIII, and did not contain Book X, the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan. Subsequent editions had only in part made good these deficiencies. More than a half of Book X, containing the letters numbered 41-121 in editions of our day, was published by Avantius in 1502 from a copy of the Paris manuscript made by Petrus Leander.[2] Aldus himself, two years before printing his edition, had received from Fra Giocondo a copy of the entire manuscript, with six other volumes, some of them printed editions which Giocondo had collated with manuscripts. Aldus, addressing Mocenigo, thus describes his acquisition: “Deinde Iucundo Veronensi Viro singulari ingenio, ac bonarum literarum studiosissimo, quod et easdem Secundi epistolas ab eo ipso exemplari a se descriptas in Gallia diligenter ut facit omnia, et sex alia uolumina epistolarum partim manu scripta, partim impressa quidem, sed cum antiquis collata exemplaribus, ad me ipse sua sponte, quae ipsius est ergo studiosos omneis beneuolentia, adportauerit, idque biennio ante, quam tu ipsum mihi exemplar publicandum tradidisses.”