Medical Compositions

tion, or the joining of the last letter with the following word, to produce various monstrosities of names. We have heard that three hundred copyists of this kind once lived together in the monastery of Fulda a famous Benedictine monastery in Germany. From the same source flowed the neglect of distinctions, with verses not separated from each other in speech, but continued in a perpetual series of letters after the ancient custom, except for the beginnings of chapters, as in the transcripts of the Pandects the Digest of Roman law of true antiquity, which are preserved among the more precious items of the Grand Duke of Tuscany in Florence: although it is probable that such intervals were not customary even in the ancient monuments of the Romans.

But old books indicate that marks were not affixed to Greek words for us in ancient times any more than to Latin ones, and especially the Hippocrates in the Vatican Library, which is known to have been transcribed from a most ancient copy by the hand of Marcus Fabius Calvus of Ravenna, the first translator. Nevertheless, Quintilian shows in his Institutes of Oratory, Book I, Chapter VII that a word different in meaning must be distinguished by an apex a diacritical mark or accent. Moreover, Strabo shows in his Geography, Book XIV, more than sufficiently, that a single omitted dot caused significant damage regarding Magnesia. Indeed, we have seen Greek words, not sufficiently grasped by unskilled scribes, sometimes corrupted into Latin characters. Nor is the nature of errors in many books less rare, arising from the marks which the Emperor Justinian rightly forbade in the preface to his Digest. For it is wonderful how often nearly fleeting strokes deceive the unwary: also, numbers expressed by marks, or by one or two syllables in older books, were placed fully as true syllables through the ignorance of the writers, not to mention the similarity of letters, which more often produced confusion inexplicable to those for whom the system of Lombardic script an early medieval script—which still remains in very few books or instruments—was not ready. And for no other reason did so many paragrammata slips of the pen or miswritten words perhaps emerge for the copyists. More serious than what should be borne, yet not to be silenced, is the [error] of the scribes