Of older scholars who had dealt with Plutarch, by far the most important was Turnebus[16] (1512-65). Of Xylander (W. Holzmann, 1532-76), who produced the Latin translation, the basis of his own commentary, and a Greek text, Wyttenbach writes with much respect and sympathy, as he does also of Reiske (1716-74), his own contemporary, who, however, was not quite adequately equipped, in point of material or of critical judgement. I should like to express my deep sense of the loss caused to classical scholarship by the lamented death of Herbert Richards. I have more than once referred to his critical notes on the _Moralia_, which have been appearing lately in the _Classical Review_: many of the finer points of Greek idiom do not concern a translator, but there are several most valuable suggestions and criticisms which I have felt confidence in adopting. A still more personal loss, which intimately concerns this volume, is that of Ingram Bywater. He had promised a revision of it in its passage through the press; and his vigilance as a Curator as well as his jealousy for the severer traditions of scholarship, apart from his personal kindness, would, I know, have made it a searching one. He did not specially care for English translation, and his own masterly version of the _Poetics_ of Aristotle is prefaced by something like a protest. Nor did he feel much sympathy with what he would call the ‘Realien’. On the realities of life no one had a saner or better informed judgement. For natural science and its representatives he cherished a genuine respect; and perhaps none of the tributes to his memory would have touched him more than one which was paid in the pages of _Nature_ by an old colleague and friend of the Exeter College days. But he had a certain shyness of the intrusion of arguments based, say, upon geometry or music, into problems of language already sufficiently perplexed. How generously his noble library and his own stores of wisdom were thrown open to those who sought them is known to many, as it is to myself. Yet another great loss to me has been that of the Rev. David Thomas, Rector of Garsington, in Oxfordshire, a veteran mathematician, my near neighbour and most kindly and helpful referee during many years.