account for the multitude of clerical errors.  Besides the last verses of the Gospel of St. Mark already alluded to, and no less than three hundred and sixty-four other omissions in the same Gospel of greater or less moment, the doxology at the end of the Lord’s Prayer, in Matthew vi. 13, is wanting; as also the description of the agony of the Saviour and the help of the angel in Luke xxii. 43, 44; the important clause, “For he was before me,” in John i. 27; the miraculous troubling of the water in the Pool of Bethesda in John v. 3, 4; the narrative of the adulterous woman in John vii. 53 to viii. 11; the question of Philip and the answer of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts viii. 37; the significant and affecting incidents in Paul’s conversion mentioned in Acts ix. 5, 6; and the well-known disputed text of the Three witnesses in Heaven, in 1 John v. 7.  These omitted passages, which, from internal evidence, apart from the external testimony of the largest number of critical documents, we must acknowledge to be genuine, are the most serious of the lacunae, amounting altogether to the extraordinary number of two thousand four hundred and fifty-six.  They give the document a very distinctive character; while even the less striking disappearances from the text, which can only be apprehended on a close collation, more or less affect the sense.  German critics have stamped several of these omissions with their approbation, especially those referring to the supernatural, owing to their well-known repugnance to the miraculous element in Scripture.

There are other peculiarities of the Codex which greatly interested me; but the discussion of them would require me to go too much into critical details.  I must mention, however, the occasional use in the manuscript of a Latinised orthography.  The name of Silvanus, for instance, mentioned in 1 Peter v. 12, is rendered into the Latinised Greek Silbanou, instead of Silouanou, the common Greek form; and in 2 Peter iii. 10, instead of the last word of the verse, katakaesetai, “shall be burned up,” occurs the singular word eurethesetai,—­which means, “shall be found.”  The Syriac and one Egyptian version have the reading “shall not be found”; and either the “not” was accidentally omitted when the Vatican Codex was copied from an earlier exemplar that had that reading, or the writer had some confused idea of the Latin word urerentur, “shall be burnt up,” in his mind, and adopted the word eurethesetai from its resemblance to it—­as a Latin root with a Greek inflection.  Some curious examples of Latin forms and constructions might be given; and this circumstance has led to the hypothesis that the origin of the Vatican manuscript might, after all, have been Italian, and not Alexandrian as is commonly supposed.  The Codex has also been accused of theological bias; for in John i. 18, “only begotten God” is substituted for “only begotten Son.”  This is considered by some to be a