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African readings are found to a certain extent in some of them, and Italian readings in others, have all substantially European texts.

114. Various modifications of late revision and mixture are represented in some Latin, MSS of the Gospels, which do not properly fall under any one of the preceding heads. Four of them are usually marked as Old Latin (ff1 g1,2 l); but most of the number pass simply as copies of the Vulgate. With few exceptions their texts are as yet imperfectly known; and the relations of their texts to each other, and to the Hieronymic or any other late revisions, have still to be investigated. They are certainly however in most cases, and not improbably in all, monuments of the process described above (§ 112) by which Old Latin readings, chiefly European but in a few cases African, found their way into texts fundamentally Hieronymic. The chief worth of these Mixed Vulgate MSS for the criticism of the Greek text consists in the many valuable particles of Latin texts antecedent to the Vulgate which have thus escaped extinction by displacing Jerome's proper readings. Mixed texts of this class are not confined to the Gospels; but in the other books, so far as they are yet known, their Ante-Hieronymic elements contain a much smaller proportion of valuable materials.

115. The Gospels alone are extant in a series of tolerably complete Old Latin MSS. For most of the other books we have, strictly speaking, nothing but fragments, and those covering only a small proportion of verses. The delusive habit of quoting as Old Latin the Latin texts of bilingual MSS has obscured the real poverty of evidence. These MSS are in Acts ''Cod. Bezae (D, d; as in the Gospels) and Cod. Laudianus (E2, e), and in St Paul's Epistles Cod. Claromontanus (D2, d) and Cod. Boernerianus (G3, g''; without Hebrews). The origin of the Latin text, as clearly revealed by internal evidence, is precisely similar in all four MSS. A genuine (independent) Old Latin text has been adopted as the basis, but altered throughout into verbal conformity with the Greek text by the side of which it was intended to stand. Here and there the assimilation has accidentally been incomplete, and the scattered discrepant readings thus left are the only direct Old Latin evidence for the Greek text of the New Testament which the bilingual MSS supply. A large proportion of the Latin texts of these MSS is indeed, beyond all reasonable doubt, unaltered Old Latin: but where they exactly cor-