[Footnote 25: Our scribe's method is as patient as it is unreflecting. Apparently he does not commit to memory small intelligible units of text, but is copying word for word, or in some places even letter for letter.]
A glance at the abbreviations used in the index of addresses on foll. 48v-49r teaches that the original from which our manuscript was copied must have had its names abbreviated in exactly the same form. There is no other way of explaining why the scribe first wrote AD IULIUM SERUIANUM (fol. 49, l. 12), and then erased the final UM and put a point after SERUIAN.
THE DATE AND LATER HISTORY OF THE MANUSCRIPT.
Our manuscript was written in Italy at the end of the fifth or more probably at the beginning of the sixth century.
The manuscripts with which we can compare it come, with scarcely an exception, from Italy; for it is only of more recent uncial manuscripts (those of the seventh and eighth centuries) that we can say with certainty that they originate in other than Italian centres. The only exception which occurs to one is the Codex Bobiensis (k) of the Gospels of the fifth century, which may actually have been written in Africa, though this is far from certain. As for our fragment, the details of its script, as well as the ornamentation, disposition of the page, the ink, the parchment, all find their parallels in authenticated Italian products; and this similarity in details is borne out by the general impression of the whole.
The manuscript may be dated at about the year A.D. 500, for the reason that the script is not quite so old as that of our oldest fifth-century uncial manuscripts, and yet decidedly older than that of the Codex Fuldensis of the Gospels (F) written in or before A.D. 546.
[Sidenote: _On the dating of uncial manuscripts_]
In dating uncial manuscripts we must proceed warily, since the data on which our judgments are based are meagre in the extreme and rather difficult to formulate.
The history of uncial writing still remains to be written. The chief value of excellent works like Chatelain's _Uncialis Scriptura_ or Zangemeister and Wattenbach's _Exempla Codicum Latinorum Litteris Maiusculis Scriptorum_ lies in the mass of material they offer to the student. This could not well be otherwise, since clear-cut, objective criteria for dating uncial manuscripts have not yet been formulated; and that is due to the fact that of our four hundred or more uncial manuscripts, ranging from the fourth to the eighth century, very few, indeed, can be dated with precision, and of these virtually none is in the oldest class. Yet a few guide-posts there are. By means of those it ought to be possible not only to throw light on the development of this script, but also to determine the features peculiar to the different periods of its history. This task, of course, can not be attempted here; it may, however, not be out of place to call attention to certain salient facts.