om the Vatican library at Rome to
which it belongs. It is written continuously (without any
division of words) on very fine vellum--one of the marks of high
antiquity--in small but neat uncial letters, very much like
those of the manuscript rolls of Herculaneum, and has three
columns to the page, which is of the quarto size. Originally it
had at the end of particular sections a small empty space of the
breadth of a letter or half a letter, but no ornamental
capitals, marks of punctuation, or accents, though some of these
have been added by later hands. The divisions into sections made
by the empty spaces above named are peculiar to this codex, not
agreeing with those of any other system. Of these Matthew has
170; Mark, 62 (so says Cardinal Mai, but others say 72 or 61);
Luke, 152; John, 80. Most of the books have also brief titles
and subscriptions. The manuscript contained originally the whole
Bible, the Apocrypha included, as also the epistle of Clement to
the Corinthians. The order of the books in the New Testament, if
entire, would be the same as in the Alexandrine manuscript, the
Catholic epistles preceding the Pauline, and the epistle to the
Hebrews coming in between 2 Thessalonians and 1 Timothy. See
below. At present the Old Testament wants the greater part of
Genesis and a part of the Psalms. In the New Testament the
epistle to Philemon, the three pastoral epistles, the latter
part of the epistle to the Hebrews, and the Apocalypse are
wanting. This manuscript is generally referred to the fourth
century. Its authority is very high, but through the jealousy of
its Roman conservators it has been of late years, for all
practical purposes, inaccessible to biblical scholars. Cardinal
Mai's edition of it in 1858, and the revision of this in 1859,
are unreliable. Tischendorf has published an edition of the New
Testament part of it. _No. (3) PLATE II_.

(2.) The _Codex Sinaiticus_, _Sinai manuscript_, designated by
Tischendorf, its discoverer, by the Hebrew letter _aleph_
([Hebrew: A]). One of the most interesting events of the present
century, in the department of biblical science, is the very
unexpected discovery of a complete manuscript of the New
Testament, belonging, as is generally agreed, to the fourth
century; therefore as old, at least, as the Vatican manuscript,