It is not worth while to attempt a more elaborate calculation.  With the edges matching so nearly, it is obvious that the original manuscript as known and used in the fifteenth century could not 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. 2º 416 and Rome Vatic. lat. 3256 reproduced in Zangemeister and Wattenbach’s Exempla Codicum Latinorum, etc., pl. 14, and in Steffens, Lateinische Palaeographie{2}, pl. 12b), in the Vienna, Paris, and Lateran manuscripts of Livy, in the Codex Corbeiensis of the Gospels, and here and there in the palimpsest manuscript of Cicero’s De Re Publica and in other manuscripts.]

Each epistle begins with a large letter.  The line containing the address which precedes each epistle also begins with a large letter.  In both cases the large letter projects into the left margin.

The running title at the top of each page is in small rustic capitals.[6] On the verso of each folio stands the word EPISTVLARVM; on the recto of the following folio stands the number of the book, e.g., LIB.  II, LIB.  III.