To one small and peculiar class of Western readings, exclusively omissions, we shall ourselves have to call attention as having exceptional claims to adoption. § 202 (p. 149). In spite of the prodigious amount of error which D contains, these readings, in which it sustains and is sustained by other documents derived from very ancient texts of other types, render it often invaluable for the secure recovery of the true text; and, apart from this direct applicability, no other single source of evidence, except the quotations of Origen, surpasses it in value on the equally important ground of historical or indirect instructiveness. To what extent its unique readings are due to licence on the part of the scribe rather than to faithful reproduction of an antecedent text now otherwise lost, it is impossible to say; but it is remarkable how frequently the discovery of fresh evidence, especially Old-Latin evidence, supplies a second authority for readings in which D had hitherto stood alone. § 240 (p. 175). On the other hand there remain, as has been before intimated (§ 170), a few other Western readings of similar form, which we cannot doubt to be genuine in spite of the exclusively Western character of their attestation. They are all omissions, or, to speak more correctly, non-interpolations of various length, that is to say, the original record has here, to the best of our belief, suffered interpolation in all the extant non-Western texts.... With a single peculiar exception (Matt. xxvii. 49), in which the extraneous words are omitted by the Syrian as well as by the Western text, the Western non-interpolations are confined to the last three chapters of St. Luke. § 241. These exceptional instances of the preservation of the original text in exclusively Western readings are likely to have had an exceptional origin. In the edition of 1896, the surviving editor (Westcott) appends an Additional Note which contains a further exceedingly valuable admission in the same direction. It is as follows:—