14 Rev. J. H. Topp on some fragments of 
by a string passing through holes in their upper corners. He describes them as 
of ivory ; the external pages, or covers, of one of them are enriched with curiously 
carved figures. The covers of the other are less elaborate, being ornamented 
more nearly like ours, by a plain, circular, raised line, with four straight lines 
running from it to the outward edge. 
Tablets of a kind similar to ours are preserved at Paris in the Bibliotheque 
du Roi; and specimens were formerly, if not at present, in the library of the 
College of the Jesuits, in the library of the Discaleced Carmelites, in that of 
St. Germain des Prés, and of St. Victor, Paris; also at Florence and at Geneva. 
The tablets preserved in the Bibliotheque du Roi I have seen ; they are of larger 
size than those now before us, but exactly similar in kind; and from the descrip- 
tion given of the others in the books I have been able to consult, such as the 
Memorr, already referred to, by M. Le Beuf, the T’raité de Diplomdtique of the 
Benedictines, and some others, they also appear to be exactly similar to ours. 
The age of those in the College of the Jesuits is fixed by an entry, still legible, 
to 1283. Those of Florence are proved to contain the travels of Philippe le Bel 
in 1301; and the tables of St. Victor and of Geneva also contain the memoranda 
made by some servant, or steward, of that prince, about the same year, and there- 
fore are to be referred to the beginning of the fourteenth century. Sig. Antonio 
Cocchi has given a full aecount of the tables of Florence in a work which I have 
not seen, entitled “ Lettera Critica sopra un Manuscritto in Cera.” 
In the year 1840, the learned M. Massman, of Munich, published at Leipsic 
an account of certain tablets of wax said to have been found in 1790 in the gold 
mines of Hungary, and professing to have been written in the third consulship 
of the Emperor Lucius Verus, that is to say, in the second century of the Chris- 
tian era. The title of M. Massman’s work (which, however, I have not seen) is 
“‘ Libellus Aurarius sive Tabule Cerate et antiquissime et unice.” It is evi- 
dent, however, that M. Massman was deceived as to the antiquity of these tablets, 
for the writing they contain is of a period much later. The Messrs. Champolion, 
in their splendid work, ‘ Paleographie Universelle,’ have given a represen- 
tation of these tablets from M. Massman’s plate. From this it appears that they 
were of the same kind as ours; but the character of the writing, and especially 
the divisions of words, are sufficient to disprove their claim to the remote antiquity 
assigned to them. 
