I had a teacher once who invariably tried to get over any difficulty in the Greek classics by saying that the text was corrupted by homoioteleuton. We did not always agree with him; he was perhaps a little too ready with this way out of a difficulty, but any one with experience knows how very apt this mistake is to occur. Footnote 252: This applies to printed editions as well as to manuscripts. Van Ess’s reprint of the Sixtine Septuagint (1824) is very carefully done, yet five words have dropped out in Joel iii. 9. These are omitted in all the later editions of 1835, 1855 (novis curis correcta), 1868, and 1879, and were only supplied by myself in 1887 on the occasion of the third centenary of the Sixtine edition. They are omitted in Tischendorf’s first edition of 1850, and also in the second of 1856. Footnote 253: In ancient times people always read aloud, even when reading by themselves. Footnote 254: Scrivener would explain the “remarkable confusion” of the two prepositions προ and προσ, when compounded with verbs, which we meet _e.g._ in Matt. xxvi. 39; Mark xiv. 35; Acts xii. 6; xvii. 5, 26; xx. 5, 13; xxii. 25, by saying that the symbol [Symbol: an abbreviation made of a rho character written on top of a block with three lines.] is used indifferently for προ and προσ in the Herculanean rolls, and here and there in Codex Sinaiticus. Seeing that it has become a bad habit in Hebrew Grammars to speak of Aleph _prostheticum_ instead of _protheticum_, and that the practice is still defended (Gesenius-Kautzsch^{26}, p. 64, n. 3, “rightly so”) after my notice of it (_Marginalien_, p. 67), I have given some little attention to this confusion, and could cite dozens of examples. Others, of course, have noticed it as well as myself. In his _N.T._, i. 20, B. Weiss says: “The compounds with προ and προσ are interchanged quite heedlessly,” and he cites in proof of this eight passages from the Acts. He writes similarly in ii. 34. I shall instance only one or two cases in connection with this same word πρόθεσις. Pitra on _Apost. Const._, 5, 17 (p. 325): πρόθεσιν restituimus cum Vatican. 2, 3, 4, 5, vulgo πρόσθεσιν; Excerpta Περὶ Παθῶν, ed. R. Schneider (_Programme of Duisburg_, 1895), where the manuscripts deviate in five passages, pp. 5, 14. 20; 6, 5; 13, 7. 13, and we read in § 10, ἀντίκειται δὲ πρόσθεσις μὲν ἀφαιρέσει, etc., and in § 11, πρόσθεσις μὲν οὖν ἐστὶ προσθήκη στοιχείου κατ’ ἀρχήν, οἷον σταφίς, ἀσταφίς καὶ ὀσταφίς. Both times, of course, it should be πρόθεσις, as the better manuscripts have it. Wherever mention is made of the “shewbread,” D invariably turns it into “extra bread,” by reading προσθέσεως instead of προθέσεως. Tischendorf first called attention to this in Luke vi. 4, but it occurs also in Matt. xii. 4. I have no doubt myself that in the case of verbal forms, the σ was inserted in order to avoid the hiatus before the augment.