—e 
SYLVA CRITICA CANADENSIUM. 91 
hiigel, assign to Marcus those words which follow delector. Thus they 
read: “Marcus. Sed credo, Quinte, ut c. s., sic etiam s. m. recte 
requirt.” Hither of these readings fails to account for the presence 
of several letters in the MSS. The following reading appears to me 
to be free from objection on this score: delector ; sed recte, credo, 
requiro....modum. M. Recte requiris. With regard to the 
emendation here proposed, it is necessary to remark that recte credo 
would degenerate into recedo through one of the most frequent 
sources of corruption in MSS., viz., the confusion of the letters ¢ and 
¢; it would be superfluous to adduce examples of this well known 
fact. Another step in this progress of error would be the omission, 
almost regular in MSS., of recurrent letters, which would account for 
the disappearance of ct and e; and, finally, the letter r being indicated, 
rather than written, by a dash, would readily escape notice. Thus 
the word progressa, which immediately follows, is said to be givei as 
peessa or processa in the best MSS. 
11. Jbid., IT. xxv. 63. Here Vahlen gives the reading of the best 
MSS. as “ WVam et Athenis iam illo mores a Cecrope, ut aiunt, per- 
mansit hoc ius terra humandi.” He proposes nam et Athenis, (nostis) 
iam illos mores, &c. The reading given in the text of Nobbe, Klotz, 
and Halm—nam et Athenis ille mos a Cecrope, d&c.—is said to be 
found as an interlinear correction of the MSS. Halm, however, in a 
foot note, speaks of the passage as a locus nondum sanatus. A state- 
ment which Madvig makes in his Adversaria (Vol. I., p. 40), that 
the words mores and maiores are occasionally interchanged in MSS8., 
suggested what I conjecture to have been the original reading, 
namely: Vam et Athenis iam illo a Cecrope, maiores ut aiunt, ce. 
“ For at Athens too, even from the time of the famous Cecrops, as the 
ancients say, &c.” The confusion of maiores with mores would lead 
naturally to this transposition of the words. The age of Cecrops 
would appear to have passed into a proverbial expression for the 
remotest antiquity, the words wt aiunt being regularly used in quot- 
ing a proverb. 
12. Virgil, Georgics, B. TII., v. 348. 
‘*Omnia secum 
Armentarius Afer agit, tectumque Laremque 
Armaque Amycleumque canem Cressamque pharetram : 
Non secus ac patriis acer Romanus in armis 
Injusto sub fasce viam quum carpit, et hosti 
Ante expectatum positis stat in agmine castris.” 
