In 1708 Thomas Hearne, the antiquary, bought at auction a peculiar volume of Pliny’s _Letters_. It consisted of Beroaldus’s edition of the nine books (1498), the portions of Book X published by Avantius in 1502, and, on inserted leaves, the missing letters of Books VIII and X.[8] The printed portions, moreover, were provided with over five hundred variant readings and lemmata in a different hand from that which appeared on the inserted leaves; the hand that added the variants also wrote in the margin the sixteenth letter of Book IX, which is not in the edition of Beroaldus. Hearne recognized the importance of this supplementary matter, for he copied the variants into his own edition of the _Letters_ (1703), intending, apparently, to use them in a larger edition which he is said to have published in 1709; he also lent the book to Jean Masson, who refers to it in his _Plinii Vita_. Upon Hearne’s death, this valuable volume was acquired by the Bodleian Library in Oxford, but lay unnoticed until Mr. E.G. Hardy, in 1888,[9] examined it and, after a comparison of the readings, pronounced it the very copy from which Aldus had printed his edition in 1508. External proof of this highly exciting surmise seemed to appear in a manuscript note on the last page of the edition of Avantius, written in the hand that had inserted the variants and supplements throughout the volume:[10] “hae plinii iunioris epistolae ex uetustissimo exemplari parisiensi et restitutae et emendatae sunt opera et industria ioannis iucundi prestantissimi architecti hominis imprimis antiquarii.” [Footnote 8: See plate XVII, which shows the insertion in Book VIII.] [Footnote 9: _Journal of Philology_ XVII (1888), pp. 95 ff., and in the introduction to his edition of the _Tenth Book_ (1889), pp. 75 ff.] [Footnote 10: See Merrill _C.P._ II, p. 136.] What more natural to conclude than that here is the very copy that Aldus prepared from the ancient manuscript and the collations and transcripts sent him by Fra Giocondo? One fact blocks this attractive conjecture: though there are many agreements between the readings of the emended Bodleian book and those of Aldus, there are also many disagreements. Mr. Hardy removed the obstacle by assuming that Aldus made changes in the proof; but the changes are numerous; they are not too numerous for a scholar who can mark up his galleys free of cost, but they are decidedly too numerous if the scholar is also his own printer.