PREFATORY NOTE.

The Pierpont Morgan Library, itself a work of art, contains masterpieces
of painting and sculpture, rare books, and illuminated manuscripts.
Scholars generally are perhaps not aware that it also possesses the
oldest Latin manuscripts in America, including several that even the
greatest European libraries would be proud to own. The collection is
also admirably representative of the development of script throughout
the Middle Ages. It comprises specimens of the uncial hand, the
half-uncial, the Merovingian minuscule of the Luxeuil type, the script
of the famous school of Tours, the St. Gall type, the Irish and
Visigothic hands, and the Beneventan and Anglo-Saxon scripts.

Among the oldest manuscripts of the library, in fact the oldest,
is a hitherto unnoticed fragment of great significance not only to
palaeographers, but to all students of the classics. It consists of six
leaves of an early sixth-century manuscript of the _Letters_ of the
younger Pliny. This new witness to the text, older by three centuries
than the oldest codex heretofore used by any modern editor, has
reappeared in this unexpected quarter, after centuries of wandering and
hiding. The fragment was bought by the late J. Pierpont Morgan in Rome,
in December 1910, from the art dealer Imbert; he had obtained it from De
Marinis, of Florence, who had it from the heirs of the Marquis Taccone,
of Naples. Nothing is known of the rest of the manuscript.

The present writers had the good fortune to visit the Pierpont Morgan
Library in 1915. One of the first manuscripts put into their hands was
this early sixth-century fragment of Pliny’s _Letters_, which forms the
subject of the following pages. Having received permission to study
the manuscript and publish results, they lost no time in acquainting