There is abundant evidence elsewhere in the Letters that the immediate ancestor of BF was written in minuscules; I need not elaborate this point.  Our present consideration is that apart from the three instances of simple emendation just discussed, there is no good reading of B or F in the portion of text contained in _{Pi}_ that may not be found, by either the first or the second hand, in _{Pi}_.[37]

[Footnote 37:  There are one or two divergencies in spelling hardly worth mention.  The most important are 63, 10 caret B KARET _{Pi}_; caritas B KARITAS _{Pi}_.  Yet see below, p. 57, where it is shown that the ancient spelling is found in B elsewhere than in the portion of text included in _{Pi}_.]

We may now examine a most important bit of testimony to the close connection existing between BF and _{Pi}_. B alone of all manuscripts hitherto known is provided with indices of the Letters, one for each book, which give the names of the correspondents and the opening words of each letter.  Now _{Pi}_, by good luck, preserves the end of Book II, the beginning of Book III, and between them the index for Book III.  Dr. F.E.  Robbins, in a careful article on B and F, and one on the tables of contents in B,[38] concluded that P did not contain the indices which are preserved in B, and that these were compiled in some ancestor of B, perhaps in the eighth century.  Here they are, in the Morgan fragment, which takes us back two centuries farther into the past.  A comparison of the index in _{Pi}_ shows indubitably a close kinship with B.  A glance at plates XIII and XIV indicates, first of all, that the copy B, here as in the text of the Letters, is not many removes from scriptura continua.  Moreover, the lists are drawn up on the same principle; the nomen and cognomen but not the praenomen of the correspondent being given, and exactly the same amount of text quoted at the beginning of each letter.  The incipit of III, xvi (AD NEPOTEM—­ADNOTASSE UIDEOR FATADICTAQ.) is an addition in _{Pi}_, and the lemma is longer than usual, as though the original title had been omitted in the manuscript which _{Pi}_ was copying and the corrector of _{Pi}_ had substituted a title of his own making.[39] It reappears in B, with the easy emendation of facta from fata.  The only other case in the indices of a right reading in B that is not in _{Pi}_ is in the title of III, viii:  AD SUETON TRANQUE _{Pi}_ Adsu&on tranqui. B.  In both these instances the scribe of B needed no external help in correcting the simple error.  Far more significant is the coincidence of B and _{Pi}_ in very curious mistakes, as the address of III, iii (AD CAERELLIAE HISPULLAE for AD CORELLIAM HISPULLAM) and the lemma of III, viii (FACIS ADPROCETERA for FACIS PRO CETERA).