announced themselves as _Nine hundred and fourty Scottish Proverbs_.
In the edition of 1667, according to Beveridge, "The proverbs are
numbered to 945; but no doubt there are omissions, as in ... 1692."
The edition of 1692 also runs to 945, "with 14 numbers omitted and
one number duplicated," making a total of 932, and in the edition of
1706 "a fifteenth number is omitted." [5] No information
about the editions of 1709 and 1716 is available. The edition of 1799
was reduced to 577 items.

Two manuscripts that were probably written in the first half of the
seventeenth century belong to the tradition represented by Fergusson's
collection but differ more or less widely from it in ways that
require further study. Beveridge, who prints one of these manuscripts
in its entirety, conjectures that it may "be a much extended version
founded upon a manuscript copy of [the edition of 1641], no doubt
made before the year 1598, when Fergusson's collection had presumably
been completed" (p. xvi). However this may be, it contains 1656
proverbs with repetitions and changes in alphabetization that make
it difficult to determine what has been added or perhaps omitted. In
preparing Beveridge's materials for publication, Bruce Dickins came
upon a second "roughly contemporary" manuscript containing an unspecified
number of proverbs (pp. 126-127). It contains some texts found in both
the first manuscript and the book of 1641 and some entirely new texts,
and agrees in one instance with the book against the manuscript and
in another with the manuscript against the book. Since only twelve
proverbs from this second manuscript are in print, any inferences about
relationships are risky.

The successful career of Fergusson's collection or the manuscripts
from which it was derived extended even farther than a share in the