If we find that in a certain number of manuscripts the passage usually indicated as John vii. 53-viii. 11 occurs in Luke, and in exactly the same place in each one—viz. after Luke xxi. 38—we must needs conclude that the manuscripts exhibiting this common peculiarity are intimately connected with each other. This is the case with the cursives 13, 69, 124, 346, 624, 626. Whether the others that are reckoned in this group have this same peculiarity, I am not perfectly sure. Now one would naturally expect that these manuscripts would also coincide in the other peculiarities characteristic of this group. [Sidenote: Variation.] But on the contrary, they part company over the very first and most conspicuous of these—viz. Matthew i. 16. Here, unfortunately, 13 and 69 are defective, but we can compare 124 and 346. And we find that whereas the former has the usual text, the latter, with the support of 556, 624, 626, exhibits in place of τὸν ἄνδρα ... Χριστός, the reading already mentioned, ᾧ μνηστευθεῖσα παρθένος Μαριὰμ ἐγέννησεν Ἰησοῦν τὸν λεγόμενον Χριστόν. Which of these readings is right, or whether both of them may not be wrong, we need not enquire at present. It is sufficient to point out that one and the same mother may give birth to very different children. The specific difference will be inherited from the other of the two parents, in this case represented by the copyist, and will depend on whether he is painstaking, careless, violent, arbitrary, well-informed, or the reverse. But the mother herself has a great number of hereditary or acquired peculiarities which, the latter no less than the former, may be transmitted to the children in a variety of ways. There is perhaps no manuscript in existence which is entirely free from corrections, while, on the other hand, there are many so overlaid with corrections that the original writing is scarcely now recognisable. Codex B, on the whole, is in a very good state of preservation, but it was supposed lately (see _ThLz._, 1899, col. 176) that its first hand wrote in John viii. 57, “and Abraham saw thee” instead of “and hast thou seen Abraham,” as all our editors read in that passage.[163] The supposition proved to be incorrect, but if that could possibly happen with B, what must have happened in the case of manuscripts that are so full of corrections as א and D, if they came to be copied in later times? Suppose that one scribe took the trouble to copy the text of the first hand, while another thought it his duty to follow the corrections, the result would be two manuscripts whose common origin would be scarcely recognisable. And in the course of centuries how often may not this process have been repeated. No wonder, therefore, that so few manuscripts have as yet been clearly made out to be the descendants of our oldest codices, so as to permit of their being removed from the board with one sweep, as having no independent testimony to contribute,