Now, since the name of Isaiah occurs in the first, the third and the fourth of these places in connexion with the quotation from Is. xl. 3, _what_ more obvious than that some critic with harmonistic proclivities should have insisted on supplying _the second also_, i.e. the parallel place in St. Mark's Gospel, with the name of the evangelical prophet, elsewhere so familiarly connected with the passage quoted? This is nothing else in short but an ordinary instance of Assimilation, so unskilfully effected however as to betray itself. It might have been passed by with fewer words, for the fraud is indeed transparent, but that it has so largely imposed upon learned men, and established itself so firmly in books. Let me hope that we shall not hear it advocated any more. Regarded as an instrument of criticism, Assimilation requires to be very delicately as well as very skilfully handled. If it is to be applied to determining the text of Scripture, it must be employed, I take leave to say, in a very different spirit from what is met with in Dr. Tischendorf's notes, or it will only mislead. Is a word--a clause--a sentence--omitted by his favourite authorities [Symbol: Aleph]BDL? It is enough if that learned critic finds nearly the same word,--a very similar clause,--a sentence of the same general import,--in an account of the same occurrence by another Evangelist, for him straightway to insist that the sentence, the clause, the word, has been imported into the commonly received Text from such parallel place; and to reject it accordingly.