With regard to the former task, it might not be essential to make such a minute collation of the manuscripts as Ferrar, Hoskier, and other investigators deemed necessary, and as is certainly the right thing to do in the case of the oldest documents. With such a mode of procedure, the task could not be accomplished in any conceivable time. But suppose the work was organised the way that Reuss did with the printed editions, by selecting say a thousand passages for comparison, it would be possible, and in a very short time we should be much better informed than we are at present as to the state of the text in our manuscripts, and especially in the minuscules. Such a task, moreover, must be preceded by a fresh scientific statement of the way in which the text was propagated previous to the invention of printing, on the lines laid down by Hort in the first fourteen paragraphs of his _Introduction_.[155] A necessary preliminary to this is the study of genealogy, in which we have an excellent guide in Ottokar Lorenz’s _Lehrbuch der gesamten wissenschaftlichen Genealogie_ (Berlin, 1898). See especially the first chapter of Part I. on the distinction between Genealogical Tree (Table of genealogy) and Table of Ancestors, and the third chapter of Part II. on the problem of Loss of Ancestors. All the ideas pertaining to the genealogy of living creatures, such as crossing, heredity, and so forth, fall to be considered also in the genealogy of manuscripts, the only difference being that in the latter case new features make their appearance. It has been asserted somewhere that if an Englishman, a Dutchman, a German, a Frenchman, and an American meet in a company, the nationality of each is at once recognisable, but it is impossible to determine their exact genealogical relationships, and that the same impossibility exists in the case of the manuscripts of the New Testament. That is perhaps an exaggeration, but it is certainly a surprising fact that so few even of our latest manuscripts can be proved with certainty to be copies of manuscripts still in existence, or at least to be derived from a common original. [Sidenote: Analogous works.]