There are four very ancient and important manuscripts, all of which originally contained the entire Greek Bible of the Old and New Testament, and which belong to a time when the arrangements of Euthalius, especially his stichometrical mode of writing (Chap. 25, Nos. 6-9), had either not been introduced or not come into common use.  These are the following: 

(1.) The Codex Vaticanus, Vatican manuscript, marked by the letter B, and so called from 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, perhaps older, and of very high authority in biblical criticism.  In a visit to Mount Sinai in 1844, Tischendorf had found at the convent of St. Catharine