The St. Johns herald., 1891-03-12
Th. rAIE or BOOKS.
Ups and Downs Of Important Literary
 Works Of Antiquity.

Works of Antiquity.
 The ups and downs of many an impor- tant literary wcck of antiquity have been most singular. Tn very unique way they demonstrate the correctness of the classical dictum "habent sua fata Ebeln." It is we'll known that the ac- cidental discovery in Q waste-b basket in the Mount Sinai cloister of several leaves of the COdex Sinaiticus led to the fn1i1g by Tischendorf Of that most fa- nous manuscrip5 of the New Testa- nent A recent publication by the Trench savant, OmOnt, has drawn at ~ntion to the strange fato of another c.l manuscript, and at the same time indicates the laborious methods to Y hich scholars must resort in order to radiscover some Of the lost remains of ancient literatures. In one Of the we'll known cloisters on Mount Athos, where more than twenty thousand Greek man uscripts are preserved and awaiting further research, there existed ct enc time siXth-cen tury copy of the Pauline epistles. In the thirteenth century monkish ignorance destroyed this valu- able document. and used the leaves as binding for later and inferior books. A number Of these manu- scripts in tfe seventeeth century found their way to Western Europe, and came into possession Of the French Chancellor, Pierre Sagnier, and are now found in the Bibiiotheque Rationale in Paris. In the year 1715 Montfaucon found in these buildings fourteen leaves of this old epistle manuscript. Some years later other leaves were found, namely, two in the s faodical Library at Moscow; four in the possession of Bishop Porfiri and of the Abbot An tonius, Of Kicw; two in the University Library at Turin; nine in the library of tho Lawra cloister on Mount AthOs. In this way thirty-on3 leaves of this manu- script had been undiscovered, but scat tered over all Europe. To these Omont has added ten more, one of which was found in the Rumjanzen Museum at Moscow, and nine in the collection which the French specialist in Greek literature, Emmanuel Miller had found in an Athos cloistcr, and had been se- cured by the National Library in Paris, Of these nine leaves, however, two had in the beginning of this century in some way or ether found their way to St. Petersburg, where also one of the leaves of the nine originally belonging to Bishop Porfri was redIScovered; and of the nine leaves which DuchesHe in 1875 found iI the cloister Lawra, one is now il Paris.
 Accordingly, the fortY-one leaves of this sixth-century manuscript are found scattered in no fewer than eight li- 9r&rics, namely, twenty-two in tho Ma tic2al Library of Paris, eight in the Lawra cloister on Mount Athos. two in the SyEo3ical Library at MJseow enc in tho Ru@janzen Museum at Moscow, thrca i'll the Imperial Library at St Petersburg, three in the Aca deny C. E.ow and two in the unive rsity at Turin. And yet these leaves contain only about onc-tenth of all the epist,cS, namely, 234 verses, divided as follows: lG from l. Corinthians, 42 from 1T. Corinthians, 2S from Galatians, go from ColossiaG5, 13 from l. Thessa- loniaEs, 4 from Hebrews, 40 from I. Timothy, from II. Timothy and 13 from Titus.
 By similar process Prof de Goije, of Leylen, has succeeded in rediscovering the works of Tabari, who for Arabic his toriography is what Thucydides is for the Greek and Livy for the Latin. His history was supposed to have been lost, with the exception of a few fragments. De Goije, through correspondence with nearly all the libraries of Europe and many in the Moslem lands, has been able to gather together again all the parts and portions of this standard work, to which the library of the leading mosque in Tunls furnished the chief contribution. Literary coadjutors are at work in dozens of libraries copying and col!ating the fragments, and it is supposed that five years will elapse be- fore the whole of this valuable work will be given to the historian and Ori- entaiist.-Harper's Weekly.