366 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
LIV.—On a Lonpon MS. or Crcero’s Lerrers. By Lovis C. Purszr, 
MAGE eeC Ds 
[Read, June 8, 1885. ] 
PART Te 
In the notes of the Preface to the volume of Baiter and Kayser’s 
edition of Cicero, which contains the Epp. ad Familiares, reference is 
made to two Harleian mss. of that work, which Oehler, even as far 
back as 1839, saw to be independent of the Medicean (M), the 
acknowledged foundation of the criticism of these letters. The 
grounds for his opinion, however, do not appear to have been very 
cogently set forth; at least they failed to convince Baiter. Sub- 
sequently Fr. Riihl, in the Rheinisches Museum, vol. xxx. (1875), 
called attention again to these mss., and showed reason why we should 
consider them not to have been copied from M. But Rihl’s paper 
was very short, a mere excerpt from a letter he wrote to Ritschl. It 
accordingly occurred to me last year that it would not be inadvisable 
to collate these mss. of the epistles, and examine them as carefully 
as my time allowed. This I did; and the results of the examination 
of the volume which contains the last eight books of the Zpp. ad 
Fam., 1 am now venturing to lay before the Academy. 
The ms. is No. 2682 of the Harleian collection, a fine folio in 
single columns, written on rough parchment. The lines are ruled a la 
pointe séche. As well as I could judge from undoubted specimens 
of thirteenth century writing, this ms. belongs to that age; and such 
is the opinion also of Ruhl. The writing is very good and regular, 
the diphthongs @ and @ are almost always expressed by plain e, the 
letters ¢ and ¢ are constantly confused, the words are frequently 
separated by little strokes inclining towards the left, there are dots 
over double z, the punctuation is very careless—all marks of thirteenth 
century copying (see Chassant, Paleographie des Chartes, p. 96). The 
ms. consists of 192 folia and 25 quaternions. There are 32 lines on a 
page, and about 82 letters im a line. The handwriting varies on 
fol. 13, returning to the original hand at fol. 14. It varies to yet a 
third hand at fol. 32, which continues to fol. 56. Return is then 
made to the first hand; and in it the rest of the ms. is transcribed. 
There are few corrections by a second hand in any of the treatises, 
except the Philippics. 
On fol. la, at the top, we find an entry of the date on which 
it came into Harley’s possession, viz., 20 die mensis Octobris, A. D. 
1725. [It was on the same day that he got 2725 (Graevius’ well- 
