Without pretending to decide on the priority of the first five editions,--as I have not been able to perceive any sufficient marks from which the order in which they were published might be ascertained,--I shall here give a brief account of a copy of that edition which Heineken ranks as the third. It is in the King’s Library at the British Museum, and was formerly in the collection of Monsieur Gaignat, at whose sale it was bought for George III. It is a small folio of forty leaves, impressed on one side only, in order that the blank pages might be pasted together, so that two of the printed sides would thus form only one leaf. The order of the first twenty pages is indicated by the letters of the alphabet, from +a+ to +v+, and of the second twenty by the same letters, having as a distinguishing mark a point both before and after them, thus: +. a .+ In that which Heineken considers the first edition, the letters +n+, +o+, +r+, +s+, of the second alphabet, making pages 33, 34, 37, and 38, want those two distinguishing points, which, according to him, are to be found in each of the other three Latin editions of forty pages each. Mr. Ottley has, however, observed that Earl Spencer’s copy wants the points,--on each side of the letters +n+, +o+, +r+, +s+, of the second alphabet,--thus agreeing with that which Heineken calls the first edition, while in all other respects it answers the description which that writer gives of the presumed second. Mr. Ottley says, that Heineken errs in asserting that the want of those points on each side of the said letters is a distinction exclusively belonging to the first edition, since the edition called by him the second is likewise without them.[II-62] In fact, the variations noticed by Heineken are not only insufficient to enable a person to judge of the priority of the editions, but they are such as might with the greatest ease be introduced into a block after a certain number of copies had been taken off. Those which he considers as distinguishing marks might easily be broken away by the burnisher or rubber, and replaced by the insertion of other pieces, differing in a slight degree. From the trifling variations noticed by Heineken[II-63] in the first three editions, it is not unlikely that they were all taken from the same blocks. Each of the triangular ornaments in which he has observed a difference, might easily be re-inserted in the event of its being injured in taking an impression. The tiara of Moses, in page 35, letter +. p .+ would be peculiarly liable to accident in taking an impression by friction, and I am disposed to think that a part of it has been broken off, and that in repairing it a trifling alteration has been made in the ornament on its top. Heineken, noticing the alteration, has considered it as a criterion of two different editions, while in all probability it only marks a trifling variety in copies taken from the same blocks. [Footnote II-62: Inquiry, vol. i. p. 129.]