If all the above readings, then, were in the Parisinus, how did Aldus arrive at them? Did he fish round, now in the Princeps, now in the Roman edition, despite the repellent errors that those texts contained,[64] and extract with felicitous accuracy excellent readings that coincided with those of the Parisinus, or did he draw them straight from that source itself? The crucial cases are 65, 11 and 24. As he must have gone to the Parisinus for these readings, he presumably found the others there, too. Moreover, he did not get his new variants by a merely sporadic consultation of the ancient book when he was dissatisfied with the accepted text of his day, for in the two crucial cases and many of the others, too, that text makes sense; some of the readings, indeed, are accepted by modern editors as correct.[65] Aldus was collating. He carefully noted minutiae, such as the omission of _et_ and _iam_, and accepted what he found, unless the ancient text seemed to him indisputably wrong. He gave it the benefit of the doubt even when it may be wrong. This is the method of a scrupulous editor who cherishes a proper veneration for his oldest and best authority. [Footnote 64: See above, p. 58.] [Footnote 65: See above, pp. 47 f.] Budaeus, on the other hand, is not an editor. He is a vastly interested reader of Pliny, frequently commenting on the subject-matter or calling attention to it by marginal signs. As for the text, he generally finds Beroaldus good enough. He corrects misprints, makes a conjecture now and then, or adopts one of Catanaeus, and, besides supplementing the missing portions with transcripts made for him from the Parisinus, inserts numerous variants, some of which indubitably come from that manuscript.[66] In the present section, occupying 251 lines in _Π_, there is only one reading of the Parisinus--a false reading, it happens--that seems to Budaeus worth recording. Compared with what Aldus gleaned from _Π_, Budaeus’s extracts are insignificant. It is remarkable, for instance, that on a passage (65, 11) which, as the appended obelus shows, he must have read with attention, he has not added the very different reading of the Parisinus. Either, then, Budaeus did not consult the Parisinus with care, or he did not think the great majority of its readings preferable to the text of Beroaldus, or, as I think may well have been the case, he had neither the manuscript itself nor an entire copy of it accessible at the time when he added his variants in his combined edition of Beroaldus and Avantius.[67] [Footnote 66: See Merrill, “Zur frühen Ueberlieferungsgeschichte des Briefwechsels zwischen Plinius und Trajan,” in _Wiener Studien_ XXXI (1909), p. 257; _C.P._ II, p. 154; XIV, p. 30 f. Two examples (216, 23 and 227, 18) will be noted in plate XVII a.]