420 H. B. Dewing, 
Kirsten set forth in detail the different varieties of hiatus found 
in Choricius (Pars Altera, p. 25), but he goes no further than the 
manuscript tradition except in rare cases, and leaves out of account 
the question whether such cases of hiatus as dé jv were not uniformly 
avoided by elision in speaking or reading. This is an important 
question in reading clausule, because the number of syllables in 
arsi is reduced by one if elision be admitted in such a case as 
tote O& HV. 
A test was made by K. Krumbacher, Ein Dithyrambus auf den 
Chronisten Theophanes (Sitzungsbericht der k. bayer. Akad. d. Wiss. 
1896, p. 583), and Eine neue Vita des Theophanes Confessor (same 
publication 1897, p. 371), which is of especial interest from the 
paleographical standpoint. Two punctuated manuscripts came 
under his observation in the study of these works, and he counted 
the clausule before all the periods indicated in the two manuscripts 
with a result decidedly favorable to Meyer’s law (p. 598 ff.); in 
one case (a Munich manuscript), from a total of 256 cases, 239 were 
found regular as understood by Meyer, as against 17 irregular; in 
the other case (a Moscow manuscript), a total of 330 cases con- 
tained 286 regular, as against 44 irregular. It is observed that the 
manuscripts of the accentual Church poetry of Byzantine times use 
the same signs in marking verse endings as those found in these two 
manuscripts. Yet too much stress should not be laid on these 
marks as indicating the cola of rhythmical prose because punctuation 
is found in manuscripts of prose writers who lived before the cursus 
law existed. The practice in the use of commas in these two 
manuscripts is noteworthy ; Krumbacher finds them used both to mark 
genuine sense pauses between clauses, and also in cases where no 
pause can be intended, but where the mark of punctuation can be 
of assistance to the eye in reading; for example, a comma is found 
after o uéy. In this latter case the comma can not be considered 
as marking a rhythmical clausula, though it does in the former. 
In the year following Krumbacher’s second article an attempt 
was made to define still more accurately Meyer’s Jaw by Konstantin 
Litzica, Das Meyerische Satzschlussgesetz in der Byzantinischen 
Prosa; mit einem Anhang tiber Prokop von Kdsarea, Miinchen 1898. 
Litzica rightly maintains that some definite criterion must be 
furnished for the detection of the cursus and the classification of 
writers according as they observe the law closely, or carelessly, 
or not at all. The first test is derived from a mathematical com- 
putation of the possibilities of the language itself. For this pur- 
pose a typical writer was chosen—Leontius of Naples (7 cen- 
is 
