stood alone:--such is the imperative strength of the evidence. To begin then. Tischendorf--(who may be taken as a fair sample of the assailants of this passage)--commences by stating roundly that the Pericope is omitted by [Symbol: Aleph]ABCLTX[Symbol: Delta], and about seventy cursives. I will say at once, that no sincere inquirer after truth could so state the evidence. It is in fact not a true statement. A and C are hereabout defective. No longer possible therefore is it to know with certainty what they either did, or did not, contain. But this is not merely all. I proceed to offer a few words concerning Cod. A. Woide, the learned and accurate[593] editor of the Codex Alexandrinus, remarked (in 1785)--'Historia adulterae _videtur_ in hoc codice defuisse.' But this modest inference of his, subsequent Critics have represented as an ascertained fact, Tischendorf announces it as 'certissimum.' Let me be allowed to investigate the problem for myself. Woide's calculation,--(which has passed unchallenged for nearly a hundred years, and on the strength of which it is now-a-days assumed that Cod. A must have exactly resembled Codd. [Symbol: Aleph]B in _omitting_ the _pericope de adultera_,)--was far too roughly made to be of any critical use[594]. Two leaves of Cod. A have been here lost: viz. from the word [Greek: katabainon] in vi. 50 to the word [Greek: legeis] in viii. 52: a _lacuna_ (as I find by counting the letters in a copy of the ordinary text) of as nearly as possible 8,805 letters,--allowing for contractions, and of course not reckoning St. John vii. 53 to viii. 11. Now, in order to estimate fairly how many letters the two lost leaves actually contained, I have inquired for the sums of the letters on the leaf immediately preceding, and also on the leaf immediately succeeding the hiatus; and I find them to be respectively 4,337 and 4,303: together, 8,640 letters. But this, it will be seen, is insufficient by 165 letters, or eight lines, for the assumed contents of these two missing leaves. Are we then to suppose that one leaf exhibited somewhere a blank space equivalent to eight lines? Impossible, I answer. There existed, on the contrary, a considerable redundancy of matter in at least the second of those two lost leaves. This is proved by the circumstance that the first column on the next ensuing leaf exhibits the unique phenomenon of being encumbered, at its summit, by two very long lines (containing together fifty-eight letters), for which evidently no room could be found on the page which immediately preceded. But why should there have been any redundancy of matter at all? Something extraordinary must have produced it. What if the _Pericope de adultera_, without being actually inserted in full, was recognized by Cod. A? What if the scribe had proceeded as far as the fourth word of St. John viii. 3, and then had suddenly checked himself? We cannot tell what appearance St. John vii. 53-viii. 11 presented in Codex A, simply because the