Prior to the year 1901, when Sabbadinil discovered in an Ambrosian MS some references which Pier Candido Decembrio (1399-1477) jotted down in his diary, our knowledge of the existence of an extensive lacuna after c. 35 (ad veros iudices ventum) was entirely based upon the testimony of the following marginal notes in our MSS: A: hic desunt sex pagelle. B: deerant in exemplari sex pagellae vetustate consumptae. E: hic deest multum. in exemplari dicitur deesse sex paginas. A: hic est defectus uni' folii cum dimidio. V: hic est defectus unius folii cum dimidio. Ven.: hic deficiunt quattuor parvae pagellae. C (or C2): multum deficit in exemplaribus quae reperiuntur. In D only 12' lines are left vacant and in H a space equivalent to nearly j of the treatise was apparently reserved for the subsequent discovery of the lost portions. The printed editions finally, up to that of Beroaldus, give a continuous text, without the slightest intimation of a lacuna. The identical statements of ABE are, of course, not so many independent witnesses, but they were all derived ultimately from a common source, the codex Hersfeldensis, which, we now know, was brought to Italy by Henoch of Ascoli about 1455,2 16 pages of the original being still extant in the cod. Aesinus,3 discovered in Iesi in 1902. B's specific information, if it was not added conjecturally by Pontanus, from whose copy B is directly derived, may reproduce the marginal note of the archetype exactly, but whether it was this codex or its parent MS which preserved the evidence justifying the number six is no longer ascertainable. The determination of the extent of this large gap has, of course, considerably exercised the ingenuity of critics for a long time, but as I Riv. di fil. class. XXIX, 262; Scoperti 141, 166. Cf. also Wissowa, Preface to the Sijthoff facsimile of the cod. Leidensis (B), pp. v-vii (1907). 2 Decembrio, as he tells us himself, saw the MS from which he drew his information in Rome in that year. a See Annibaldi's admirable edition of this MS and Wissowa, op. cit. [CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY VII, October, 1912] 412