have contained some
other work, however brief, before Book I of Pliny's _Letters_. If the
manuscript contained the entire ten books it consisted of about 260
leaves. This sum is obtained by counting the number of lines in the
Teubner edition of 1912, dividing this sum by 19, and adding thereto
pages for colophons and indices. It would be too bold to suppose
that this calculation necessarily gives us the original size of the
manuscript, since the manuscript may have had less than ten books, or it
may, on the other hand, have had other works. But if it contained only
the ten books of the _Letters_, then 260 folios is an approximately
correct estimate of its size.

It is hard to believe that only six leaves of the original manuscript
have escaped destruction. The fact that the outside sheet (foll. 48r and
53v) is not much worn nor badly soiled suggests that the gathering of
six leaves must have been torn from the manuscript not so very long ago
and that the remaining portions may some day be found.

[Sidenote: _Disposition_]

The pages in our manuscript are written in long lines,[4] in _scriptura
continua_, with hardly any punctuation.

[Footnote 4: Many of our oldest Latin manuscripts have two and even
three columns on a page, a practice evidently taken over from the
roll. But very ancient manuscripts are not wanting which are written
in long lines, _e.g._, the Codex Vindobonensis of Livy, the Codex
Bobiensis of the Gospels, or the manuscript of Pliny's _Natural
History_ preserved at St. Paul in Carinthia.]

Each page begins with a large letter, even though that letter occur in
the body of a word (cf. foll. 48r, 51v, 52r).[5]

[Footnote 5: This is an ear-mark of great antiquity. It is found,
for example, in the Berlin and Vatican Schedae Vergilianae in square
capitals (Berlin lat. 2