These details might be indefinitely added to by references to other codices and monuments of antiquity, but we have employed most of the principal copies of the Greek Testament, and have indicated to the student the chief points to which his attention should be drawn. Three leading principles have perhaps been sufficiently established by the foregoing examples:
First, that the uncials used in writing differ from the capitals cut in stone by the curved shapes which the writing hand naturally adopts(34).
Secondly, that the upright uncials of square dimensions are more ancient than those which are narrow, oblong, or _leaning_(35).
Thirdly, that the simpler and less elaborate the style of writing, the more remote is its probable date.
Copies of a later age occasionally aim at imitating the fashion of an earlier period, or possibly the style of the older book from which their text is drawn. But this anachronism of fashion may be detected, as well by other circumstances we are soon to mention, as from the air of constraint which pervades the whole manuscript: the rather as the scribe will now and then fall into the more familiar manner of his contemporaries; especially when writing those small letters which our Biblical manuscripts of all dates (even the most venerable) perpetually crowd into the ends of lines, in order to save space.