second enlarged edition, 1900; F. Carta, C. Cipolla e C. Frati, _Monumenta Palaeographica sacra: Atlante paleografico-artistico composto sui manuscritti_, Turin, 1899; Karl Dziatzko, _Untersuchungen über ausgewählte Kapitel des antiken Buchwesens. Mit Text, Uebersetzung und Erklärung von Plinii Histor. Nat._, lib. xiii. § 68, 69, Leipzig, Teubner, 1900. 1. MANUSCRIPTS. [Sidenote: Number of manuscripts.] For no literary production of antiquity is there such a wealth of manuscripts as for the New Testament. Our classical scholars would rejoice were they as fortunate with Homer or Sophocles, Plato or Aristotle, Cicero or Tacitus, as Bible students are with their New Testament. The oldest complete manuscript of Homer that we have dates from the thirteenth century, and only separate papyrus fragments go back to the Alexandrian age. All that is extant of Sophocles we owe to a single manuscript dating from the eighth or ninth century in the Laurentian Library at Florence. But of the New Testament, 3829 manuscripts have been catalogued up till the present. A systematic search in the libraries of Europe might add still more to the list; a search in those of Asia and Egypt would certainly do so. Gregory believes that there are probably some two or three thousand manuscripts which have not yet been collated, and every year additional manuscripts are brought to light. Most of these are, of course, late, and contain only separate portions, some of them mere fragments, of the New Testament.[20] Not a few, however, go much further back than our manuscripts of the Hebrew Old Testament and most of the Greek and Latin Classics. Only in the case of the Mohammedan sacred books is the condition of things more favourable. These came into existence in the seventh century, and the variations between separate manuscripts are a vanishing quantity, because the text of the Koran was officially fixed at a very early date and regarded as inviolably sacred. Fortunately, one might almost say, it is quite different with the New Testament, which was put together in a totally different way. In its case the very greatest freedom prevailed for at least a century and a half. The manuscripts of the New Testament being so numerous, it becomes necessary to arrange them. One of the most important considerations hitherto has been that of age, and therefore manuscripts have been divided into =Uncials= (or Majuscules) and =Cursives= (or Minuscules), according to the style of writing in use at earlier or later times. [Sidenote: Uncial, and Cursive script.]