ing their beds on the floor, and sometimes taking their meals from the altar; and when service is performed, it will be by a well-educated clergyman, who considers himself passing rich on ten to two hundred florins a year, and who shoes horses or makes hay, whilst his lady milks cows and tends sheep.

But the Icelander will tell us that his country has some splendid negative advantages at the least. It has no forts, no soldiery, no policemen (worth mentioning), no custom-house officers, no income-tax gatherers, and happily for its peace (so the general public may say), no professional lawyers! Neither has it had a single executioner for some time past, for it is remarkable that no native could be found to undertake this odious duty; and consequently, it has been necessary to export malefactors to the mainland, in order that they might be despatched. He will tell us also such is the strong attachment which man naturally conceives for his native spot, however uncouth and ungenialthat, though his country is blistered with lava and blanched with snow, though its hills may be without verdure and its valleys without corn, though its atmosphere reeks with sulphur and its streams may flow from boiling fountains, though he walks on a nest of earthquakes and sleeps amongst a host of angry volcanoes, and though, to all appearance, his little island might at any moment be blown up into the air, or let down into the sea; yet, after all, in his opinion, Iceland is the very best spot on which the sun shines.'

'Still, even here, content can spread a charm,
Redress the clime, and all its rage disarm.

Though poor the peasant's hut, his feasts though small,
He sees his little lot, the lot of all;

Sees no contiguous palace rear its head,

To shame the meanness of his humble shed;

No costly lord the sumptuous banquet deal,

To make him loathe his poor and scanty meal;
But calm, and bred in ignorance and toil,
Each wish contracting, fits him to the soil.'

Just one point more. At the present moment Iceland possesses an additional feature of interest-one which may possibly render it of great service to the New World as well as the Old. The difficulties of laying an electric cable across the Atlantic, and of working it with the requisite vigour when laid, have made it expedient to break the length of the journey by establishing several intermediate posts. By fixing upon three stepping-stones, as it were, the ocean may certainly be overleaped by the galvanic fluid. without much sense of resistance. Of these Iceland must be

one. We conclude by giving Commander Forbes's opinion on the subject, at the same time expressing our obligations to him for his lively and interesting work. It is sketchy in character, and scarcely fulfils the expectations which its title and appearance excite. Nor is the language at all eminent for its polish; but taking it as a sailor's narrative, purposely written with a freeand-easy pen, the reader will find much in its pages to entertain and instruct.

'The manifest advantages of a North Atlantic telegraph would be, that four electrical circuits would be obtained, none of greater length than six hundred miles; and as submarine telegraphs now working at greater lengths demonstrate the possibility of complete insulation and retardation up to that distance, whereas, when we get beyond the thousand miles, all is doubt and conjecture, to say nothing of the hazard attendant on the enterprise, and the advantage of having to relay a portion instead of the whole length of the line, in the event of a fracture, the superiority of this route cannot fail to command attention. The honour of originating the North Atlantic line belongs wholly to Colonel Shaffner, of the United States, who, in 1854, obtained a cession from the Danish Government of exclusive telegraphic rights in the Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland. His proposed route is as follows:-From Scotland to the Faroes, 250 miles; from Faroes to Iceland, 350 miles; from Iceland to Greenland, 550 miles; from Greenland to coast of Labrador, 600 miles. Now with regard to the objections that may be advanced against this line there are only two worthy of notice-namely, the icebergs of these northern coasts and the submarine volcanic line of the south-western extreme of Iceland. The latter may be easily avoided by landing the cable on any of the many eligible spots between Portland and Cape Reykiances, and thence carrying the line across country to any part of Faxe Fiord. All this portion of the coast is free from icebergs, and the shore-ice occasionally formed in the winter is inconsiderable; and besides, it has been already demonstrated in the Baltic and American lakes that shore-ice does not interfere with the workings of submarine lines. With regard to any local electrical difficulties to be surmounted, it must be remembered that, as far as our present knowledge goes, they are only conjectural; and when it is added that the bottom in these regions is, for the most part, composed of sand and mud, and nowhere of a greater depth than two thousand fathoms,* the only wonder is that this North-about route was not first adopted.'

* The expedition since employed to sound this line found much less depth of water than had been anticipated.

ART. III.-Notitia Editionis Codicis Bibliorum Sinaitici Auspiciis Imperatoris Alexandri 11. susceptae. Accedit Catalogus Codicum nuper ex Oriente Petropolin perlatorum. Edidit AENOTH. FRID. CONST. TISCHENDORF, &c. Lipsia, 1860.

THE discovery of an entire MS. of the Greek Testament written, as is said, in the early part of the fourth century-a date anterior, or at least equal, to that of any now extant-is an event which has naturally awakened the greatest interest in the literary world. It is true that many ancient MSS. of that precious volume have been added, during the present century, to the long list of critical apparatus for determining the text which formerly existed; but none of these contain more than portions of the Greek Testament, whilst most of them belong to the class called cursive MSS., written at a later period, as is generally thought, than the Uncials. But the turning up of a veritable Uncial Codex of the whole New Testament in the original Greek of the same, or even greater antiquity than the famous Vatican, Alexandrian, and Cambridge MSS., is an event such as never has fallen to the lot of the journalist to record since the time when our Charles I. received the priceless Alexandrian MS. as a present from Cyril, the Patriarch of Constantinople.

The first intimation of this extraordinary discovery was contained in a letter from Professor Tischendorf to Von Falkenstein, the Minister of State in Saxony. This letter was published in a Leipsic journal in the spring of the year 1859. The details which this document contains are so deeply interesting that our readers, we are sure, will be glad to have the following translation of the principal part of this epistle placed before them:

The kindness which your Excellency showed towards me, on my departure from my native land, makes it my agreeable duty to address to you the first account of a very important literary discovery, which the good hand of the Lord has granted to my new investigations in the East. You are aware what weight the learned world attaches to the famous Vatican MS. of the Bible, and how it has for centuries been esteemed one of the special treasures of the Papal library. You know how anxious men have been, and how difficult they have found it, to collate even single passages; how earnestly Mai's edition, undertaken by command of the Pope, had been looked out for since 1828, and how gladly it was received at last, after thirty years' delay, at Easter, 1858.

'Were I now to say that Providence has preserved in the corner of the cloisters of the East so often ransacked, a MS. which may rank with the Vatican in point of character, extent, and age, and which, on

some accounts, claims the precedence of it, I shall not be surprised if some doubt my skill, and the questions be put,' Is it indeed true? Is it even possible ?' And yet, as I held in my hands for the first time the precious leaves, in a convent chamber at the foot of the Mount of Moses, my own astonishment, my own wonder, were as great as can be conceived.

'The MS. of whose discovery I shall inform you consists of three hundred and forty-six leaves of fine and fair parchment, and of so large a size that two of them required a whole gazelle skin. The writing on each leaf, arranged in four columns, is of the most ancient character, and is for the most part preserved with wonderful distinctness, especially on the outside of the skin; but on the flesh side it is sometimes less legible, and in such places it is far more difficult to decipher the numerous, and certainly very ancient corrections to which the Codex has been subjected.

"Manuscripts of this class confessedly are always without date. The problem of palæography is, by careful attention to all the peculiarities of each separate MS., from the character of the letters employed, from the punctuation, from the use of initials, and from subscriptions and inscriptions, from the parchment, the tints of the ink, the old corrections, and so forth, to ascertain, more or less satisfactorily, its antiquity. As to this MS., there was scarcely needed any date to fix its century, for that it was written in the fourth century can be proved by all the arguments which have any weight in palæographic science, almost beyond all question.

"The Vatican Codex belongs to the same age, in my opinion, and that of other able men. The only other Greek parchment MS. to which I had before given a chronological place prior to the Vatican was the Leipsic Codex, Friderico-Augustanus; but this, as I am already convinced, is a relic of the very MS. of which I am so happy as to posses sthese important constituents.

"This MS. still contains, first, considerable portions of the Old Testament-viz., most of the greater and lesser Prophets, the Psalms, Job, the Book of Jesus the Son of Sirach, the Wisdom of Solomon, and other books of the Apocrypha. These are followed by the entire New Testament; and herein lies the extraordinary value of the discovery. Only three extensive Biblical MSS. of high Christian antiquity have come down to us from the fourth century to the ninth. The most comprehensive among them is the London Codex Alexandrinus, which wants almost the whole of the Gospel by Matthew, as well as a considerable part of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, and two chapters of John's Gospel. The Vatican MS. is still more defective-viz., the Apocalypse, four of the Epistles of Paul, and a third part of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Whilst, of the MS. of the New Testament now found, not a single leaf is wanting! It is, consequently, the only one among the MSS. of the New Testament of a thousand years old and upwards which is complete. The divine who

Discovery of the Manuscript.

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knows the importance attaching to the MSS. of that age, in the attempt to fix the apostolic text, will accept this as a principal authority. It is a new pledge of the possibility of finding and restoring the genuine apostolic text, to which this is doubtless a close approximation as to its main features. I only add, that my examination of the MS. convinces me that it perfectly coincides in age with the Vatican Codex.'*

Tischendorf goes on to state, that at the end of the New Testament he discovered two other works of considerable value-the Epistle of Barnabas, and the first part of the Shepherd of Hermas, both in the original Greek. The first-named production was, as is well known, quoted by Clement and Origen, in the second century, as a part of the Holy Scriptures. What makes the discovery important is the fact that no ancient copy of this Epistle was previously known to exist; and all known MSS. of it were deficient in the first five chapters, of which only a corrupt Latin version existed. The Shepherd of Hermas, too, until lately, was known to us only through a Latin translation. And the only Greek MS. known to exist was one containing a corrupt text brought by Simonides to Leipsic from Mount Athos in 1855.

After spending several months in searching amongst the libraries of the East for further treasures, and bringing to light a great number of additional MSS.-Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Hebrewour fortunate traveller returned to his native country laden with literary spoils. The Sinaitic MS. was exhibited in the first instance to the King of Saxony, Tischendorf thinking it a pious duty to permit no eye in his country to behold the treasure before his Majesty himself had inspected it. It was afterwards shown to the Minister of State, Von Falkenstein, and to several scholars and men of rank. The Professor then took it to Petersburg, and exhibited it to the Emperor, who immediately announced his intention of publishing a splendid fac-simile edition of the Codex, which we shall have occasion to speak of in a subsequent page.

We have now arrived at an epoch in the history of the Sinaitic MS. of the greatest importance, viz., the publication of Tischendorf's Notitia-a minute account of the discovery, characteristics text, &c., of this remarkable Codex of the Greek Testament. It must be granted that abundant time has elapsed for the complete publication of the MS. itself. The discovery was made in the early part of the year 1859-two years ago. We cannot but regret then, that, after the lapse of so long a period, we are still unable to make full use of this valuable addition to the critical

Wissenschaftliche Beilage der Leipziger Zeitung, April 17, 1859.