Strangely enough, Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy, so recently as 1837, in publishing his _Rotuli Chartarum_ (Introduction, p. ii. note 5) declared that no original of John’s Charter existed. Many copies, he knew, had been "made and deposited, for the sake of perpetuation, in all the principal religious houses in the kingdom. However, notwithstanding all the care taken by multiplication of copies, it is singular that no contemporary copy of King John’s Magna Carta has yet been found." The Lincoln MS. he dismissed as “certainly not of so early a date,” while he confuses the only one of the British Museum MSS. known to him with the Articles of the Barons. He further reasserts the fallacy, so clearly exposed by Blackstone eighty years earlier, that John had issued a separate _Carta de Foresta_. ----- As these four versions are practically identical in their substance—the variations being merely in the use of contractions or in other verbal changes of a trivial character—no important question seems to be involved in the discussion as to whether any one of them has greater value than the others. The Record Commissioners considered that the Lincoln copy was the first to be completed (and therefore that it possessed special authority), because, unlike the two Cottonian copies, it contained no insertions at the foot of the instrument. Yet it seems more plausible to argue that this very immunity from clerical errors, or from additions made after engrossment, proves that it was of later and less hurried execution than the others, and therefore of less authority, if any distinction is permissible. Mr. Thomson has much ground for his contention in speaking of the fire-marked version in the British Museum that “the same circumstances may probably be a proof of its superior antiquity, as having been the first which was actually drawn into form and sealed on Runnymede, the original whence all the most perfect copies were taken.”[301] ----- Footnote 301: Thomson, _Magna Charta_, 422. ----- In all printed texts of Magna Carta, the contents are divided into a preamble and sixty-three chapters, and each chapter is numbered and treated in a separate paragraph by itself. There is no warrant for this in any one of the four originals, all of which run straight on from beginning to end, like other feudal charters, and contain no numbers or other indication where one provision ends and another begins. Strictly speaking, Magna Carta has thus no chapters: these are a modern invention, made for convenience of reference.