It will be disappointing news, perhaps, to those to whom the facts are fresh, that no original manuscript of any classical author, and no original manuscript of any part of the Bible, Old Testament or New, has yet come to light. Nothing is known of any of these documents except through the medium of copies, and in some cases very many copies indeed intervene between us and the original. For instance, the oldest Homeric manuscript known, with the exception of one or two fragments, is not older than the first century B.C., and the most ancient Biblical manuscript known, a fragment of a Psalter, is assigned to the late third or early fourth century A.D. The earliest New Testament manuscript extant, the first leaf of a book of St Matthew's Gospel, is also no older than the third century. It is curious, too, that no ancient Greek manuscripts have been found either in Greece or Italy excepting some rolls discovered in the ruins of Herculaneum. One reason for this is no doubt the fact that when Roman armies assailed Athens and other Greek cities they despoiled them not only of their statues and works of art, but of their books as well. These went to furnish the libraries of Rome, though it is probable that certain of them found their way back to Greece in company with some of Rome's own literary produce when Constantine set up his capital and founded a library at Byzantium. Another means by which Greek manuscripts left the country was afforded by the eagerness of Ptolemy II. to extend the great library of Alexandria, to which end he bought books in all parts of Greece, and particularly in Athens and Rhodes. The Roman libraries did not survive the onslaughts of the barbarians, who seem to have carried out a very thorough work of destruction in the Eternal City. But it is not unlikely that in some cases books, among other portable treasures, were carried away when their owners sought refuge in less troubled localities, such as Constantinople or Alexandria. Still, the fact remains that the contents of the Roman libraries have disappeared, and that for the ancient manuscripts now in our possession we are indebted to the tombs, the temples, the monasteries, and the sands of Egypt. Sometimes--to show the strange adventures of some of these manuscripts--the cartonnage cases in which mummies of the later period were enclosed, were made of papyrus documents, which apparently had been treated as waste paper and put to all sorts of undignified uses. The two oldest classical papyri known, consisting of fragments of Plato's _Phoedo_ and of the _Antiope_ of Euripides, were recovered from mummy-cases, and are supposed to date from the third century B.C. Other important Greek texts which have been preserved by Egypt are Aristotle's _Constitution of Athens_, the _Mimes_ of Herodas, the _Odes_ of Bacchylides, the _Gospel_ and _Apocalypse_ of Peter, the Book of Enoch, &c.