The books which had been left by deceased members of the university were considered to be the property of the university authorities, and could be sold only under their express directions. The commission allowed by the authorities for the sale of books was limited to 2½ per cent., and before any books could be transferred at private sale, they must be offered at public sale in the auditorium. The purpose of this regulation was apparently here as in Paris not only to insure securing for the books sold the highest market prices, but also to give some protection against the possibility of books being sold by those to whom they did not belong. The regulation of the details of the book business appears to have fallen gradually into the hands of the bedels of the Faculty, and the details of the supervision exercised approach more nearly to the Italian than to the Parisian model. The third German university was that of Heidelberg, founded in 1386. Here the regulations concerning the book-trade were substantially modelled upon those of Paris. The scribes and the dealers in manuscripts belonged to the privileged members of the university. The provisions in the foundation or charter of the university, which provided for the manuscript-trade, make express reference to the precedents of the University of Paris. By the middle of the fifteenth century, there appears to have been a considerable trade in manuscripts in Heidelberg and in places dependent upon Heidelberg. In the library of the University of Erlangen, there exists to-day a considerable collection of manuscripts formerly belonging to the monastery of Heilsbronn, which manuscripts were prepared in Heidelberg between 1450 and 1460. The series includes a long list of classics, indicating a larger classical interest in Heidelberg than was to be noted at the time in either Prague or Vienna.[379] The University of Cologne, founded a few years later, became the centre of theological scholarship in Germany, and the German manuscripts of the early part of the fifteenth century which have remained in existence and which have to do with theological subjects were very largely produced in Cologne. A number of examples of these have been preserved in the library of Erfurt. One reason for the smaller importance in Germany of the _stationarius_ was the practice that obtained on the part of the instructors of lecturing or of reading from texts for dictation, the transcripts being made by the students themselves. The authority or permission to read for dictation was made a matter of special university regulation. The regulation provided what works could be so utilised, and the guarantee as to the correctness of the texts to be used could either be given by a member of the faculty of the university itself or was accepted with the certified signature of an instructor of a well known foreign university, such as Paris, Bologna, or Oxford.