oth have been used in preparing the notes to the
text. Later on, after the Hebrew text had already been printed, I
visited Rome, and on examining the MS. I found that a few variants had
been overlooked. I had facsimiles made of several pages, which will be
found with the Hebrew text.

3. E, a MS. now in the possession of Herr Epstein of Vienna, who
acquired it from Halberstamm's collection. The only reliable clue as
to the date of this MS. is the license of the censor: "visto per me
fra Luigi da Bologna Juglio 1599." Herr Epstein considers it to have
been written at the end of the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth
century. The MS. is on paper and in "Italian" handwriting. It contains
seventy-four quarto pages of from 19-20 lines each. Speaking generally
it is analogous to the edition of Ferrara, 1556, which was used by
Ashor as the groundwork of his text (Asher, p. 3), but the spelling of
persons and places in E often differs from that in the text of Asher.

4. O, in the Oppenheim collection of the Bodleian Library (MS. Opp.
add. 8 deg. 36; ff. 58-63; Neubauer 2425), is a fragment. Its first three
leaves are continuous, beginning at p. 61 of Asher's edition and
ending at p. 73. After this there is a _lacuna_ of four leaves, and
the fragment, which recommences at p. 98 of Asher's edition, is then
continuous to the end of the book. The volume in which it is bound
contains various other treatises written by the same scribe, and
includes a fragment on Maimonides, whose death is mentioned as
occurring in 1202, and also part of a controversy of Nachmanides which
took place in 1263.

The MS. is in Spanish Rabbinic characters, and would appear to have
been written in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. For the collation
of this and the following fragment I am indebted to the kindness of my
friend Mr. A. Cowley, of Oxford. Photographs of pages of both MSS.
will be found with the Hebrew text.

5. B, also in the Oppenheim collection of the Bodleian Library (MS.
Opp. add. 8 deg., 58; fol. 57; Neubauer 2580). This fragment begins at p.
50 of Asher's edition. The date of this fragment is probably much
later than that of O, and may well be as late as the eighteenth
century. It appears to be written in an oriental hand.

In addition to the critical text, I give a translation of the British
Museum MS., and add brief notes thereto. I have purposely confined the
latter to small dimensions in view of the fact that Asher's notes