(These are entirely missing, no trace of them having been found attached to any of the four codices of Book I or to the present text of Books IV to X. We know that such books must have once existed, as at the end of Book IV (p. 117 _infra_) the author tells us that all the famous opinions of earthly philosophy have been included by him in the preceding _four_ books, of which as has been said only Books I and IV have come down to us. Our only ground for conjecture as to the contents of Books II and III is to be found in Hippolytus’ statement at the end of Book I, that he will _first_ make public the mystic rites[1] and then the fancies of certain philosophers as to stars and magnitudes. As the promise in the last words of the sentence seems to be fulfilled in Book IV, where he gives not only the method of the astrologers of his time, but also the calculations of the Greek astronomers as to the relative distances of the heavenly bodies, it may be presumed that this was preceded and not followed by a description of the Mysteries more elaborate and fuller than the casual allusions to them which appear in Book V. So, too, in Chap. 5 of the same Book IV, which he himself describes in the heading as a “Recapitulation” of what has gone before, he refers to certain dogmas of the Persians and the Babylonians as to the nature of God, which have certainly not been mentioned in any other part of the book which has come down to us. So, again, at the beginning of Book X, which purports to be a summary of the whole work, he tells us that having now gone through the “labyrinth of heresies,” it will be shown that the Truth is not derived from “the wisdom (philosophy) of the Greeks, the secret mysteries of the Egyptians,[2] the fallacies of the astrologers, or the demon-inspired ravings of the Babylonians.” The Greek philosophy and astrological fallacies are dealt with at sufficient length in Books I and IV respectively, but nothing of importance is said in these or elsewhere in the work as to the mysteries of the “Egyptians,” by whom he probably means the worshippers of the Alexandrian divinities, and nothing at all as to Babylonian demonolatry or magic. It is quite true that he follows this up immediately by the statement that he has included the tenets of all the wise men among the _Greeks_ in four books, and the doctrines of the heretics in five; but it has been explained in the Introduction (pp. 18 ff. _supra_) that there are reasons why the summarizer’s recollection of the earlier books may not be verbally accurate, nor does he say that the description of the philosophic and heretical teachings exhausted the contents of the first four books. On the whole, therefore, Cruice appears to be justified in his conclusion that the missing books contained an account of the “Egyptian” Mysteries and of “the sacred sciences of the Babylonians.”)[3] FOOTNOTES [Footnote 1: τὰ μυστικά.]