If, however, we turn from this to such statements of Hippolytus as we can check from other sources, we find many reasons for doubting not indeed the good faith of him or his informants, but the accuracy of one or other of them. Thus, in his account of the tenets of the philosophers, he repeatedly alters or misunderstands his authorities, as when he says that Thales supposed water to be the end as it had been the beginning of the Universe,[27] or that “Zaratas,” as he calls Zoroaster, said that light was the father and darkness the mother of beings,[28] which statements are directly at variance with what we know otherwise of the opinions of these teachers. So, too, in Book I, he makes Empedocles say that all things consist of fire, and will be resolved into fire, while in Book VII, he says that Empedocles declared the elements of the cosmos to be six in number, whereof fire, one of the two instruments which alter and arrange it, is only one.[29] Again, in Book IX, he says that he has already expounded the opinions of Heraclitus, and then sets to work to describe as his a perfectly different set of tenets from that which he has assigned to him in Book I; while in Book X he ascribes to Heraclitus yet another opinion.[30] Or we may take as an example the system of arithmomancy or divination by the “Pythagorean number” whereby, he says, its professors claim to predict the winner of a contest by juggling with the numerical values of the letters in the competitors’ names, and then gives instances, some of which do and others do not work out according to the rule he lays down. So, too, in his unacknowledged quotations from Sextus Empiricus, he so garbles his text as to make it unintelligible to us were we not able to restore it from Sextus’ own words. So, again, in his account of the sleight-of-hand and other stage tricks, whereby he says, no doubt with truth, the magicians used to deceive those who consulted them, his account is so carelessly written or copied that it is only by means of much reading between the lines that it can be understood, and even then it recounts many more marvels than it explains.[31] Some of this inaccuracy may possibly be due to mistakes in copying and re-copying by scribes who did not understand what they were writing; but when all is said there is left a sum of blunders which can only be attributed to great carelessness on the part of the author. Yet, as if to show that he could take pains if he liked, the quotations from Scripture are on the whole correctly transcribed and show very few variations from the received versions. Consequently when such variations do occur (they are noted later whenever met with), we must suppose them to be not the work of Hippolytus, but of the heretics from whom he quotes, who must, therefore, have taken liberties with the New Testament similar to those of Marcion. Where, also, he copies Irenæus with or without acknowledgment, his copy is extremely faithful, and agrees with the Latin version of the model more closely than the Greek of Epiphanius. It would seem, therefore, that our author’s statements, although in no sense unworthy of belief, yet require in many cases strict examination before they can be unhesitatingly accepted.[32]